David Lidington: Like the Secretary of State, I welcome the profound change that has taken place in the republican movement during recent years. Does he not agree, however, that that very process of change means that the existence of something calling itself an army council—and that council's continuing assertion of a claim to legitimate authority within the island of Ireland—is at odds with the transformation that the Sinn Fein leadership says that it has brought about, and with the pledge of office that Sinn Fein Ministers have taken? Surely the best way for Sinn Fein to demonstrate to the most sceptical Unionists that its commitment to democracy is really serious would be to get rid of that anachronistic institution.

Peter Hain: I share the hon. Gentleman's objective. Obviously we all look forward to a time when—as the situation continues to stabilise and the transformation deepens—there are no remnants of, and no legacy from, any of the paramilitary past that has bedevilled the people of Northern Ireland and indeed the whole island of Ireland, and that goes for every paramilitary organisation.

David Lidington: Members on both sides of the House hope to see conditions make the devolution of criminal justice and policing possible, in perhaps as little as12 months from now. Does the Secretary of State believe that for such devolution to take place we need first to reach a stage at which the British and Irish Governments feel that the Provisional IRA is no longer a terrorist threat and that, as a consequence, proscription should cease?

Peter Hain: Let us take one step at a time. The Assembly has a duty, under legislation that the hon. Gentleman supported, to report to the Secretary of State by 27 March next year on the prospects for devolution of policing and justice being completed by May next year, as the Government intend and as was set out on the Anglo-Irish agreement. We shall have to see what assessment is made and how matters progress, but as I said earlier, the IMC has stated repeatedly—I know the hon. Gentleman accepts this, and he is nodding in assent—that the Provisional IRA poses no terrorist threat, and indeed is not capable of doing so.

Peter Robinson: I jointhe Minister in welcoming the UVF's statement ofthe first steps towards a complete winding down ofits organisation. However, he, and the House, will recognise that it fell short in decommissioning terms by only putting weapons "beyond reach"—beyond whose reach is not clear. Can the Minister inject some urgency into the issue, and indeed into the issue of the disbanding of the army council of the IRA? It is essential that all paramilitary organisations go completely out of business, and are seen to be doing so.

Paul Goggins: I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that there must be a sense of urgency in relation to any organisation or individual still involved in paramilitary activity. I hope that those on either the dissident republican or the loyalist side who are still engaged in paramilitary activity will recognise what a fruitless waste the violence and conflict of the last 40 years has been, will see the hope that democracy is bringing to Northern Ireland, and will desist from their activities and join the peace process in a meaningful way.

Paul Goggins: The hon. Gentleman will understand that Ministers are not privy to the detailed discussions that take place with the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, which is headed by General de Chastelain. The general has had that meeting, however, and I hope it will lead to a new phase in which the UVF engages meaningfully with the IICD, decommissioning becomes verifiable, and we have not only the promise that weapons are beyond use but confirmation that they are.

Jeffrey M Donaldson: I thank the Secretary of State for his earlier words of congratulation. Many prisoners who enter prisons in Northern Ireland—some 10 per cent.—have amphetamine-based addictions, so rehabilitation work is clearly necessary, and we should enhance that. However, is it not the case that many drug prevention groups that work outside prisons trying to prevent young people from becoming addicted to drugs in the first place are operating on a shoestring budget? Ascert, in my constituency, is doing good work, but it cannot get funding. Do we not need to address the root cause of this problem by supporting groups that are trying to prevent it from happening in the first place?

Paul Goggins: The Police Service of Northern Ireland takes the lead in detecting and preventing terrorist activities by organisations such as the one that the hon. Gentleman mentioned. So far this calendar year, there have been 31 incidents involving dissident republican organisations. As recently as April, a serious incident was prevented in Lurgan by the PSNI, by a timely interception of what would have been a serious mortar attack. We should all compliment the PSNI on the work that it is doing and make it clear to those involved in dissident republican organisations, and loyalist paramilitary groups, that law enforcement will continue to hunt them and bear down on them.

David Simpson: The Secretary of State will be aware of a number of recent arrests in the Province—those of Brian Arthurs and two of his comrades, and of Roisin McAliskey, commonly known throughout the Province as members of the Provisional IRA. Can the Minister give us some background to the situation and assure us that if request is made by the German authorities for the extradition of Roisin McAliskey, it will be accommodated?

Henry Bellingham: Further to the question asked by the hon. Member for South Antrim (Dr. McCrea), does the Minister agree that, with the Provisional IRA army council in place, the IRA has a ready-made infrastructure to rebuild a terrorist capability rapidly at any time? Now that Sinn Fein is in government, surely the time has come for it finally to sever any links with its sister organisation the IRA? Otherwise, how can the Ulster public have real confidence in Sinn Fein Ministers?

Peter Hain: The House will note the hon. Gentleman's representations, but there has been all sorts of speculation about that, and I do not intend to pursue it.

Gregory Campbell: I thank the Secretary of State for the improving security situation, which he has now referred to twice. Can he ensure not only that the improvement continues but also that we systematically try to purge Northern Ireland society of all aspects of paramilitary activity?

Tony Blair: We are making progress on the commitments to the millennium development goals, particularly in respect of the commitment to halve the world's population living in poverty, on which we are making significant progress. In respect of HIV/AIDS, we believe we will have near universal access by 2010. In respect of primary education, there is a big increase in the numbers going into it in Africa, but we need to do much more. The G8 summit in a couple of weeks will be immensely important. Both in Washington last week and in Germany a couple of weeks ago, I urged the American and German Governments to do more in respect of Africa and poverty, and I hope very much that those efforts will come to fruition at the G8 conference.

Tony Blair: First, I think it is important that the G8 leaders live up to the commitments given at Gleneagles, and the next couple of weeks will be absolutely vital in that regard. As a result of Gleneagles, we have wiped out billions of dollars-worth of debt for some of the poorest countries, and radically increased the number of children going into primary education—often precisely because of that debt relief. This country should be proud of the fact that it has trebled its aid to Africa and doubled its overall aid budget. As a result of what we are able to do now on HIV/AIDS, a real difference is being made: hundreds of thousands of lives are being saved in Africa. We have to do more and we will do more—the next couple of weeks will be vital in that—but we should be particularly proud of what this country has achieved in relation to the millennium development goals.

Tony Blair: Helping every child reach their full potential and closing the attainment gap between disadvantaged young people and their peers is a priority for our education policy. In that respect, the roll-out of children's centres across the country—there will be 3,500 by 2010—the additional support for families with children, particularly the poorest, and early years intervention, when children are at both pre-nursery and nursery stage, are making a real difference, but I agree that much more needs to be done.

Tony Blair: I most certainly will not advise —[ Interruption. ] I will not advise abandoning the programme or the home information packs at all.It is extraordinary that the Conservative party is opposing energy performance certificates —[ Interruption. ] Yes, it is absolutely typical. The right hon. Gentleman says that he cares about the environment, but when there is a specific measure to help the environment, he opposes it. He opposed the climate change levy and he now opposes energy performance certificates. He cannot say where he stands on nuclear power or any of the issues in today's White Paper. The fact of the matter, as ever, is that when it comes to serious politics, we take the decisions, he makes the gestures.

David Cameron: Everybody knows that energy performance certificates could be introduced anyway—that fig leaf is not even green. Last Wednesday in the House of Commons, the Housing Minister —[ Interruption. ] The Prime Minister should listen—[Hon. Members: "Ooh!"] Well, he is not going to be here much longer.
	The Prime Minister's Housing Minister led us to believe that there were 1,100 registered home inspectors ready to go. Yesterday, it was admitted that there were less than half that number. Never mind what the next Prime Minister is going to do; what on earth is the Minister still doing in her job?

Tony Blair: I think it is instructive to look at what both parties have been doing this week. Today, we have the energy White Paper—a major task to ensure that we have energy security for the future. Yesterday, we had the draft Local Transport Bill, which allows us to reregulate the buses and introduce local road pricing. On Monday, we had the planning proposals, which are supported by industry and, incidentally, opposed by the Conservative party. And we have digital X-ray imaging for the national health service. That is what we have been doing. What has the right hon. Gentleman been doing—trying to persuade his party that grammar schools are not the answer to education. I happen to agree with him, but frankly that is an argument from the stone age. Therefore while the Labour party has been getting on with the serious business of politics, he cannot even take his party with him on that issue.

Tony Blair: First of all, may I join withmy hon. Friend in extending my sympathy and condolences to the Hawker family? As he knows, the Foreign Office has been closely in touch with the family throughout, and it is important that we continue to provide all possible assistance. I also understand that the Japanese authorities are treating it as a major case; there are something like 100 police officers or more working on it. However, I will reflect carefully on what my hon. Friend is saying, both in relation to the Japanese Prime Minister and in respect of any help that the British police can give, and I will come back to him on those points. In the mean time, I assure him that we will keep in the closest possible contact with the family.

Gordon Prentice: Our mutual friend the Chancellor has spoken about rebuilding trust in public life. Does my friend agree with me that the best way forward would be to transfer responsibility for the appointment, terms of reference and terms of office of constitutional watchdogs suchas the Committee on Standards in Public Life fromNo. 10, where prerogative powers are used, to Parliament, where they can be set up by statute?

Elfyn Llwyd: May I ask the Prime Minister to intervene personally in the debate, or rather the litigation, between the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers—the miner's union—and the Government relating to knee injuries suffered by ex-miners? Will he please request Ministers from the Department of Trade and Industry to engage constructively, so that we can try to avoid long drawn-out litigation? If he were so to intervene, I would be the first to congratulate him on his term of office, and to wish him a long and happy retirement.

Tony Blair: I obviously agree entirely with my hon. Friend that the regeneration money that has been put in to our inner cities, particularly the housing programmes and pathfinder project, has produced tremendous benefits. Some 35,000 homes around the country, including 1,800 in east Lancashire, have benefited. Of course, that is absolutely typical of the way in which the Lib Dems and the Tories get together, as they do not have the proper facility to make sure that those things count, or that the money is properly used and invested in some of the poorest communities in the country, which is one very good reason, without reverting to the previous question, why Lib Dems and Tories do not make a very good coalition.

Tony Blair: First, in respect of Queen Mary's, I understand that no decisions on its future or, indeed, of any hospital in the area have been made, so the hon. Gentleman is somewhat premature in his condemnation. Secondly, in respect of his attack on PFI, there have been 26 PFI and hospital schemes in his strategic health authority, with a value of £1.7 billion. Twenty-eight LIFT schemes have opened, and 13 are under construction in his strategic health authority. I do not know whether he speaks for his party on this issue, but if he is signalling Conservative opposition to PFI, he should know that we would never have achieved the renewal of our hospital stock without it. It is absolutely essential, as it ties companies down to delivering budgets on time and on cost. The reason for the budget deficit is the same in many parts of the country: hospitals and NHS trusts must live within their means, and it is right that a system of financial accountability should be introduced. If he is trying to say that PFI has not delivered for his constituency, I suggest that he take a look around it.

Tony Blair: We do support the aims of the right to read campaign—[Hon. Members: "Reading!"]—and the Royal National Institute of the Blind is quite right in saying that it is a very important issue. I understand that a feasibility project is being conducted by the Department of Trade and Industry and the RNIB. We are obviously not in a position to publish the conclusions yet, but I know that when we can do so we will want to do everything we can to encourage the project. The question is obviously one of cost and working out how that can be properly done. However, we support the general aims, and the feasibility project will be concluded shortly.

Tony Blair: The hon. Gentleman asks why the situation is different as between July 2004 and 1998. It is true that in 1998 we said that there should be32 such frigates and destroyers, and in 2004 we reduced that number to 25, but we then increased the number or the capability of the alternative vessels.

Alistair Darling: With permission, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I should like to make a statement on the energy White Paper and the consultation on the future of nuclear power, which I am publishing today. Copies of these, together with several accompanying papers, are in the Vote Office.
	As I said last year, we face two big challenges: first, the need, with other countries, to tackle climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions; and secondly, the need to ensure that we have secure and affordable energy supplies. Both are vital for our future prosperity; both are global issues calling for action internationally as well as action here at home.
	The evidence supporting the need for urgent action on climate change continues to mount. Sir Nicholas Stern's report last autumn underlined the importance of acting now, and together with other countries. If not tackled, climate change poses catastrophic humanitarian consequences and economic costs.
	Meanwhile, world energy demand continues to grow. It is expected to be 50 per cent. higher by 2030 than it is today, and it is likely to be met largely by fossil fuels for some time to come. That means rising greenhouse gas emissions and greater competition for energy resources, which has massive implications for both climate change and security of supply.
	Here in the UK, our reserves of oil and gas are declining. Although significant amounts remain in the North sea, production has hit its peak and is now falling. As we made clear, we will make the most of our reserves, but as our economy grows we will become increasingly dependent on imports in a world where supplies are concentrated often in less stable regions. We need to take action to manage those risks.
	In the next few years, energy companies will also need to replace ageing power stations and other infrastructure, so we need to create the right conditions for that investment to get timely and increasingly low-carbon energy supplies. The White Paper sets out a long-term framework for action to tackle those challenges at home and abroad.
	It sets out our international strategy, which acknowledges that we need to tackle climate change and energy security together. Influenced by the UK, the European Council has agreed to a new strategy, including commitments to competitive markets, cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, more renewable energy and a central role for the European Union emissions trading scheme as a potential basis for a global carbon market. We also need to influence the wider international community, notably in getting a consensus on the post-2012 Kyoto framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
	The White Paper also sets out the measures that we are taking here at home. We have already published a draft Climate Change Bill—which, for the first time, would impose a legally binding duty on Government to reduce the amount of carbon that is produced—as we work towards our target of achieving at least a 60 per cent. reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. We are the first country in the world to do that.
	Faced with such challenges, more is needed. The first priority must be to save energy. The White Paper sets out a range of measures to help us to become more energy efficient and cut energy use. Consumers need better information about how they can save energy. Next year and the year after, any householder who asks for them can get free, visual real-time displays that show the amount of electricity that they use. In parallel, we will work with the industry to ensure that consumers have visual displays, together with smart meters, in 10 years. In addition, better and clearer energy bills will help.
	It is estimated that leaving electric appliances on stand-by uses about 7 per cent. of all electricity in UK homes. That is equivalent to the electricity generated from two 600 MW gas-fired power stations or from more than 1,500 2 MW wind turbines. We will work with industry and others to improve the efficiency of domestic appliances to phase out inefficient goods and limit the amount of stand-by energy wasted.
	If we are to make a genuine difference to reducing energy demand, we need a stronger obligation on energy companies to provide their residential customers with energy-saving measures. The White Paper therefore proposes that from next year they double their current effort, and from 2012 we aim to transform the way in which they see their relationship with their customers, shifting the focus to the provision of energy services, increasing energy efficiency and saving carbon in the home, rather than simply selling them gas and electricity.
	We will also require big organisations such as supermarkets, banks or hotel chains and large public sector organisations to limit their emissions and set tougher standards for the homes that we build and the products that we buy. We need more low-carbon generation of electricity and heat. We want to encourage the enthusiasm of individuals and communities to generate their energy locally, for example in homes or schools, through solar panels and wind turbines. We are therefore introducing a range of measures to support that approach. As part of that, we will remove the barriers and simplify the licensing regime so that more communities can the follow the example of Woking, including by developing combined heat and power schemes.
	However, we still need large-scale energy investment. In the next 20 to 30 years, we need new generating capacity equivalent to approximately one third of our existing capacity. Our aim must be to ensure that companies have a wide range of options available so that we can retain a diverse energy mix, which is good both for our security of supply and will help us to move to an increasingly low-carbon economy.
	Renewables are crucial. We are strengthening support for renewable electricity. The reform of the renewables obligation is essential, and means that by 2015 we expect that around 15 per cent. of our electricity supplies will come from renewables—that is triple the current amount in only eight years. In transport, the road transport fuel obligation will save a million tonnes of carbon a year. We want to double it only if we can be satisfied that it is sustainable to do so.
	New technologies will also help. We want British-based business to be at the forefront of new green technology. That is why we set up the Energy Technologies Institute, which brings public and private investment together, now with a minimum budget of £600 million. We will launch a competition for the demonstration of carbon capture and storage, which has the potential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel power stations by as much as 90 per cent., which is important as we will rely on gas and coal power, including coal mined in the UK, for some time to come. Details are set out in the White Paper.
	We want to save energy, and we want low-carbon sources of energy. That is why we will do everything that we can to encourage renewables such as wind, wave and tidal power. But that alone will not be enough if we are to minimise our costs and risks. Alongside the White Paper, we are publishing a consultation document on nuclear power, so that we can take a decision on whether companies should have that option when making their investment decisions. We have reached the preliminary view that it would be in the public interest to allow energy companies to invest in nuclear power. Before making our decision, however, we are consulting further. The White Paper makes clear the complexities of the challenges that we face in terms of climate change and energy security. There is no single answer to those challenges. As wide a choice of low-carbon options as possible is needed, so that we do not become over-reliant on any one form of electricity generation.
	Nuclear is an important part of our current energy mix. We get about 18 per cent. of our electricity from nuclear power stations, which are a low-carbon form of generating electricity. That provides a regular and steady supply of electricity, whereas electricity generated from most renewables is, by its very nature, intermittent. Every year, a modern nuclear reactor saves about 2.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere, compared with an equivalent gas-fired station.
	Most nuclear power stations are set to close over the next 10 to 20 years at a time when we know that demand for electricity is going up because of economic growth. Quite simply, in the public interest we need to make a decision this year on whether we continue to get some of our electricity from nuclear, because new stations take a long time to build. If nuclear is excluded, there is every chance that its place will be taken by gas or coal generation, which emits carbon. Yes, carbon capture and storage, if it can be developed, would help, but at this stage we cannot be certain—there is no commercial- scale operation of carbon capture and storage on power generation anywhere in the world.
	Although we want more renewable energy as part of the mix, it, too, is controversial. There are more than 170 applications in the planning process at the moment. It will be for the private sector to initiate, fund, construct and operate new nuclear plants and cover the cost of decommissioning and its full share of long-term waste management costs. There are important issues to consider, including waste, and those will be examined in the consultation, which will run until October.
	Our measures, including those in the White Paper, put us on track to make savings of carbon emissions of between 23 and 33 million tonnes by 2020. If we meet the upper end of that range, it would be the equivalent of removing all the emissions from every car, van and lorry on Britain's roads today. By saving energy, encouraging new timely investment in gas import and storage infrastructure and maximising recovery of UK reserves of oil, gas and coal, our measures will also help security of supply.
	We cannot become a low-carbon economy in a single step. Further measures will be needed if we are to achieve our long-term goals in the light of further international agreements in Europe and more widely. The White Paper sets out a framework for action to enable us to make real progress now towards tackling climate change and ensuring secure and affordable energy supplies. I commend this statement to the House.

Alan Duncan: I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of the statement. At its heart, however, there is confusion. The Government say that certain things must be done, but their policy, at best, says that they might be done. The current Prime Minister says that the replacement of nuclear power stations is back on the agenda with a vengeance. The future Prime Minister says that a new generation of nuclear power stations will be built across the country. The most that the Secretary of State says, however, is that nuclear plant could be part of the future energy mix, and that it is for the private sector to take decisions over new nuclear power stations.
	Whatever the rhetoric, nothing in the White Paper will guarantee that a single nuclear power station will ever be built. Where has the vengeance for nuclear power gone? Are the Government saying that nuclear new build will definitely happen, or not? How many new nuclear power stations will definitely be built as a result of the White Paper? How can the Secretary of State deliver a UK-wide energy policy if Scotland rejects nuclear power? If the Scottish National party has rejected both nuclear in principle and wind in practice, is the SNP's policy anything other than utter lunacy?
	Business will invest in nuclear power only if itknows its costs. It needs certainty about carbon, decommissioning and waste. There is no greater clarity on those issues today, so what will happen if no one comes forward to invest? Over a year ago the Prime Minister said of new nuclear build that
	"if we don't take these long-term decisions now, we will be committing a serious dereliction of duty".
	Today in  The Times he says merely that we must consider it, so what decisions have been taken to address that dereliction?
	Last July we set out our objectives. We called for a cap and trade scheme for CO2 based on auctioned rights, for site and type licensing, and for reform of the renewables obligation and the climate change levy. In addition, we said that there must be long-term certainty for investors. As we keep on saying, if this could lead to broad agreement between us and the Government, that would be good for Britain.
	In today's announcement, there are detailed proposals for banding the renewables obligation, but these will not overcome its central flaws. On what basis, therefore, has the Secretary of State assessed and then chosen to reject the considered alternative put forward by Ofgem?
	Hidden in the statement is bad news about carbon capture. Will the Secretary of State confirm that his failure already to agree a pilot project for it means that any prospect of it happening has been seriously delayed? Is it not the truth that far from being on the edge of happening, carbon capture is about to be deferred and endangered? How on earth will carbon capture ever happen if it is still clobbered by the climate change levy? When will the Government remove the perversity of keeping a dirty tax on a clean process?
	On strategic infrastructure projects, we welcome site and type licensing and the streamlining of the planning process. However, we have grave concerns about entrusting that to an accountable quango.
	Our policy statement last July called for the greater use of carbon trading. A broad and rational regime for carbon trading is crucial to incentivise low carbon technologies. We therefore welcome the Government's announcement that they will broaden the scope of carbon trading to cover a greater number of businesses. We think permits should be auctioned. Will the Secretary of State tell us how and when they will be?
	Climate change is the greatest threat that we face. That is why we supported the Government in signing up to tough EU targets on emissions and renewables in March, but at present we get just 2 per cent. of our total energy from renewables. Raising that to 20 per cent. was always going to be challenging, to put it mildly, but is it not true that today's plans will, at best, get us only about halfway to that target? Is it not the case that despite the clear wish expressed in the White Paper to encourage local and decentralised energy, there is almost nothing that amounts to a robust policy that will make it happen? Again and again, the White Paper wills the ends, but does not provide the means.
	In households, smart metering could greatly increase energy efficiency and help customers to export electricity back into the grid, but the Government are supporting the limited clip-on visual electricity displays. Does this intervention not pull the rug from under the real smart meter market? Why are the Government going for the most basic option, whenreal smart meters would help to stimulate the microgeneration industry?
	Today's announcement has already been twice delayed. It is Labour's third White Paper, following dozens of consultations, and it is the product of their third energy review under their ninth Energy Minister. It offers nothing definite on nuclear or anything else. It heralds the potential collapse of carbon capture. It continues an irrational regime for carbon penalties and incentives. It provides little or no prospect of hitting renewables targets. It does not offer the security that we need. Ten months after the energy review, it is still content-free, not carbon-free.

Alistair Darling: Although the hon. Gentleman undoubtedly received my statement, I am sorry that, yet again, he did not have an opportunity to read it before he responded to me. Let me start with nuclear. As I understand his position now—I may have got it wrong, because it seems rather different from his position 12 months ago—he is berating the Government for not having said today, "Look, we're definitely going ahead with nuclear." That comes from the hon. Gentleman, who at the beginning of last year said:
	"From about the age of 12, I have had an instinctive hostility to nuclear power."—[ Official Report, 17 January 2006; Vol. 441, c. 779.]
	This is the man now urging us not to consult or do anything other than press on with it. His policy, as I understand it, is that nuclear should be deployed only as a last resort. In other words, only when it became clear that we cannot meet our obligations through renewable or other means would the hon. Gentleman say, "Okay, let's consider nuclear." That seems to me to be absolute nonsense.
	The hon. Gentleman asked me about the renewables obligation. I know that it is Tory policy to get rid of the renewables obligation, yet it has meant that we have doubled the amount of wind farm energy over the past two and a half years and that we are on track to reach the target of 15 per cent. by 2015—triple the current amount, as clearly set out in the White Paper. The Tory policy is to get rid of it. On top of that, Tory councils up and down the country are objecting to wind farms.  [Interruption.] Let us take the London Array—one of the largest offshore wind farms in Europe that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and I consented to. Who is objecting to it? Tory— [Interruption.]

Jamie Reed: I thank my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for putting forward such a thorough and courageous White Paper, which really provides what we need. I am particularly pleased that he has exposed the gesture politics that passes for energy policy on the Opposition Benches. Will my right hon. Friend tell us how soon it will be before the methodology for the siting process for the new nuclear stations is brought forward?

Susan Kramer: On our analysis, by 2050 we can reduce emissions from the power-generating sector by 94 per cent. entirely without nuclear power. Bringing in nuclear has the effect only of displacing renewables rather than gas, so nuclear brings no advantages on climate change and no advantages in security of supply in the long term. Allit does is leave us farther away from a completely renewable system.
	Does the Secretary of State not agree that carbon capture and storage will provide a better interim technology than nuclear to keep emissions low and plug any gaps in the supply system while wind, wave and tide technologies are brought on-stream? Has he not read—on the basis of his statement, I do wonder—the words of Scottish and Southern Energy on carbon capture last week to the effect that all the technology is proven at the desired scale, so we are demonstrating the ability to integrate technologies? Did not the Government sign up to a binding EU commitment on CCS by 2020? Will the Secretary of State acknowledge that CCS is more compatible witha rapid increase in renewable forms of energy andwith microgeneration, because it can accommodate variations in load—the intermittent energy that the Secretary of State mentioned—while nuclear does not do so efficiently?
	Will the Secretary of State confirm that the Government have accepted a binding commitment for 20 per cent. of all energy, not just electricity, to come from renewable sources by 2020? In his White Paper, he targets 15 per cent. of electricity by 2015, so could he please somehow integrate those two statements? Does his document on the future of nuclear power continue to assert below-market price financing for nuclear power, as he did in earlier documents and appears to continue to do today? Given his strong statements in favour of nuclear in the media today, does he think that his consultation will be seen as genuine?
	Will the Secretary of State also confirm that, by 2050, the effect of nuclear would be to reduce the percentage of electricity generated using gas from something like 19 per cent. to something like 15 per cent., and that that negates completely any argument that nuclear would significantly increase security of supply?
	Finally, I welcome the right hon. Gentleman's adoption of our proposals for a cap and trade scheme on energy efficiency and for smart metering, but why has he missed the chance offered by the White Paper to take firm action on social tariffs for vulnerable consumers? There are so many areas where the Government have made or could make U-turns, so why have they chosen to make a U-turn on the one policy that they got right the first time round?

Alistair Darling: I understand perfectly what my hon. Friend is saying. I think that I am right in saying that a good deal of work has been done in his local council area on biomass. A lot has been done in the past18 months. Apart from anything else, we have almost doubled the amount of energy that we get from wind farms in just over that period, which is important. There have also been developments in the European Union emissions trading scheme. My hon. Friend is quite right to say that we will depend on coal; we do so very substantially at the moment. Two things are necessary to get cleaner coal—although that is a comparative term in relation to carbon emissions—and to move to carbon capture and storage. I should have dealt with this point earlier, because it was raised by the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer). It is true to say that the technology to capture, transport and store the carbon exists, but it has not actually been joined up on a commercial basis yet. That is why I am so reluctant to say, "Let's abandon nuclear now." These things might never become available. I have said on many occasions that we should not put all our eggs in one basket. It makes sense to have a sensible mix, and it would make no sense at all to put these decisions off in the hope that they will not come back to bite us one day.

Alistair Darling: On the hon. Gentleman's general point, the banding of the renewables obligation will help biomass production. We are also publishing further proposals today which I hope will help in that regard. I take his point about small-scale applications, and I hope that we can do something to encourage that industry. I urge him to look at the White Paper and at the separate paper that we have published on biomass. I hope that that will be of help to him, but I would be happy to discuss the matter further.

Tom Clarke: I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement. Will he share with the House his thinking on social tariffs for vulnerable consumers? I am sure that he is aware that, during the recent debates in the House and in Committee on the Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Bill, which will introduce the national consumer council, a great deal of concern was expressed about the fact that suppliers are simply not passing on reductions in wholesale energy prices timeously to some of the poorest consumers. It was also felt that Ofgem either does not have teeth or chooses not to act in the face of that disgraceful behaviour, which is clearly undermining the Government's positive policies on fuel poverty and inflation.

Alistair Darling: I very much agree with my right hon. Friend. We have made a commitment to reduce fuel poverty, and the increase in wholesale gas prices, which was reflected in the price that consumers paid over the past 18 months, has set progress back quite substantially. The fact that wholesale prices are now coming down as a result of action that has been taken over that period is encouraging, but there are further things that we need to do. There is a discussion in the White Paper about social tariffs. As my right hon. Friend will know, different power companies have taken different approaches to this issue, but we want them all to take action because they have a real obligation to do so. I want to make it clear that if that does not happen, we might well have to consider legislation to ensure that further action is taken. We are also introducing other measures that will take about 200,000 households out of fuel poverty over the next few years. I urge my right hon. Friend to look at the White Paper, because we are determined to tackle this very real problem.

Alistair Darling: That too is mentioned in the White Paper, and my hon. Friend will know that the Sustainable Development Commission was asked to examine the implications.
	The Government would like to encourage tidal power. There are environmental issues, but one of the environmental issues that has not yet been properly addressed is the balance to be struck between the impact on, say, the River Severn and the environmental gain that would result from not putting more and more carbon into the atmosphere. Part of our problem is that the European directive does not attach enough weight to the alternative to encouraging more tidal power.
	I have a great deal of sympathy with what my hon. Friend has said. She has raised an issue of which Ministers are well aware, and I urge her to read the White Paper.

Alistair Darling: I do not accept what the hon. Gentleman says. Not a single generator has come to me and said "I am not going to build a wind farm until I know your position on nuclear generation". I think most generators would say that it is sensible to have a mix, and to ensure that we have renewable energy and more of it. As the hon. Gentleman is close to some Liberal Democrats who are objecting to various Scottish developments, let me add that if they are serious about wind farms, perhaps they should think again about objecting to every application that comes along.
	I believe that we should consider nuclear, gas and coal generation. As I said earlier, putting all our eggs in one basket does not make sense. I understand that the Liberal Democrats oppose nuclear generation—although I think the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso) takes a rather different position, which is why he is no longer a spokesman on these matters—but I suggest to the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Sir Robert Smith) that if he took a sensible view not just on climate change but on security of supply, he would recognise that it makes sense for us not to become over-dependent on imports from difficult parts of the world.

Anne Moffat: What will be the impact of the irresponsible position of the Scottish National party, who want no new nuclear build in Scotland, on the industry, the skills base and the work force?

Alistair Darling: I think you would stop me if I attempted to answer for the nationalists, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but I will say this. At present, more than a third of Scotland's electricity comes from nuclear generation, and there are at least 10 to 20 years of life left in one of its two nuclear power stations. One way or another, a substantial amount of Scotland's electricity will be generated by nuclear power, and as far as I know the First Minister will not be switching off his light for a third of the time to try to get himself out of that.
	Planning and section 36 consents are a devolved matter, and we do not propose to change that. But let me repeat that the Scottish nationalists, who tell us that they want more renewables, object to wind farm applications—perhaps more than anyone else—every time they come along. One Minister in the Scottish Executive Administration opposes installation of the power line that would carry the electricity from the wind farms down to where it is consumed. The nationalists cannot go on saying no to nuclear generation and no to renewables: that is the way to switch off the lights.

Jeff Ennis: A couple of years ago I had the privilege of opening a methane extraction plant in my constituency, on the site of the former Hickleton colliery. It is run bya company called Octagon Energy, and it produces enough electricity in my constituency to power5,000 homes for the next 20 years. Can my right hon. Friend reassure me that plants such as that will be able to qualify for the same tax incentives and assistance as those producing other forms of renewable energy?

Alistair Darling: We want to encourage development of that kind. There are many examples of methane being captured to provide energy for towns or for local businesses.
	I urge my hon. Friend to look at the results ofthe consultation, and at the banding. We want to encourage various forms of energy generation to ensure that there is diversity, and that we can recycle as much as possible. I hope that my hon. Friend will find that helpful.

Henry Bellingham: Is the Secretary of State aware that there are now500 offshore wind turbines either under construction on, or planned for, sites in the Wash or off the Norfolk coast? They are less intermittent than onshore turbines, and they have critical mass and carry huge public support, in stark contrast to the various applications for sporadic onshore sites, which are far less efficient, do huge environmental damage and are universally unpopular. What can we do to get these onshore turbines offshore?

Denis Murphy: Is my right hon. Friend aware that an application has recently been made to build a clean coal power station in my constituency? It will be a £2 billion project that will burn in excess of 6 million tonnes of coal per year. Sadly, all that coal will be imported even though the site of that power station sits on top of the great northern coalfield where in excess of 500 million tonnes of coal await exploitation. Does my right hon. Friend not think that we should be burning that coal?

Alistair Darling: I would like our reserves in this country to be recovered and burned. However, the Government cannot tell generators that they must burn UK coal and that they cannot burn imported coal; the generators must reach decisions on that. There is a lot of coal in this country that is still available to be mined. That is a resource, and we should consider exploiting it, especially as we are sometimes increasingly concerned about the difficulty in importing coal and gas. I would like British coal to be mined where that is environmentally acceptable and economically viable.

Alistair Darling: No, as with other electricity generation we believe that those are commercial decisions for the generators to take. They have to plan ahead and take many things into account. However, I think it is more likely that the carbon price will increase.

Michael Weir: Speaking on behalf of the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru, I can say that there is much in the energy White Paper that we can support, particularly on renewables and energy efficiency. Indeed, we believe that energy efficiency should be given the highest priority. However, there is a large white elephant in the room in the form of nuclear power. It will come as no surprise to the Secretary of State that the majority of people in Scotland oppose nuclear power, and the Scottish Government will not allow the building of any new nuclear power stations in our country. The Secretary of State has also rightly said that for the foreseeable future we will have to continue to burn a lot of fossil fuels. I note what he said about carbon capture, but by my reckoning this is the sixth time that that has been announced and why cannot he just press ahead with the Peterhead project which is up and ready to go? Could he also tell us—

Bob Blizzard: Britain is the windiest country in Europe. My right hon. Friend's Department has identified many sites around our coasts for offshore wind farms, which can make a major contribution towards achieving the 20 per cent. target in respect of renewable energy, but too many such developments are bogged down in the long and tedious consent process and some are facing real obstacles. What is there in the White Paper that will help those developments proceed, through streamlining the consent process and removing some of the obstacles?

Alistair Darling: The best place to refer my hon. Friend is the planning White Paper that was publishedon Monday. Attention has been focused on big infrastructure projects such as airports and nuclear power stations. It takes far too long to get consent for wind farms; far too many different sorts of consents need to be obtained. That is why I hope that all the Members of all parties who say that they want there to be more renewable energy—more wind farms, both onshore and offshore—will back the proposals in the planning White Paper which would make that possible.

Alistair Darling: First, let me congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his new role. I want there to be close relationships between the devolved Administrations and ourselves. As was the case last week in advance of the announcement on post offices, this week in advance of the announcement on energy I or my ministerial colleagues spoke to Ministers of the devolved Administrations—or offered them the opportunity to speak in one case. It is important on matters such as energy in which we all have an interest, that we all work together.

Clive Efford: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Earlier today in Prime Minister's Question Time the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) referred to St. Mary's hospital. I think he meant Queen Mary's hospital. He said that it might be closed. However, there are no plans—

Gary Streeter: I beg to move,
	That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require media organisations to disclose certain information about any payments made by them to individuals for the contribution of those individuals to articles or broadcasts in which they are involved; and for connected purposes.
	It is important that Britain retains a robust and free press. It is one of the safeguards of our constitutional freedoms and part of the mature framework of checks and balances that keeps us safe from tyranny. Many of the countries to which I travel in my work for the Westminster Foundation for Democracy would give their right arm to have an independent and rigorous press like ours. Yet there are occasions when the great British media overstep the mark and throw around their unprecedented power to influence and shape events and their ability to make or break careers and lives, without exercising proper responsibility or accountability. Too often, media stories are fabricated, exaggerated or sensationalised; too often, there are hidden agendas; and too often, we do not know enough about the integrity or motivation of the primary source of a story. In particular, we do not know whether anybody was paid for that story.
	It would be a big job—possibly beyond the scope of any party, Government or Act of Parliament—to put the media back in their box without damaging their essential freedom and the modest measure I bring forward today does not attempt to do any such thing. My Bill is designed to deal only with the fact that the reader or listener or viewer is rarely told whether a source of information for a story was paid, and if so, how much. Why is that relevant? Imagine the situation in a courtroom where a judge or jury is trying to assess the evidence in a complex set of facts. Imagine the sudden revelation in court that a crucial eye witness has been paid for his evidence by the defence. That evidence would be immediately discounted: nobody would believe a word that witness said, even if they had been telling the truth—because concern over a possible mercenary motivation would rightly undermine confidence in the reliability of the testimony.
	Why is it different in the media? In a story about an alleged neighbour from hell, a bullying boss or an unfaithful wife, I want to know if the neighbour, the employee or the husband—the persons making the colourful allegations—have been paid for their stories. Why? Because it will help me to decide what weight to give to their evidence. It will help me to make a better informed decision about motivation and veracity and whether the subject of the allegations should rightly be the object of my distrust and scorn. Ah, people argue, but this is not a court of law, this is simply a story on the TV or in the press. It is just harmless entertainment. But it is not entertainment for the hapless target of that story—countless dozens of them everyday, both celebrities and ordinary people alike, the victims of cheque-book journalism. What about the law of defamation, surely that can be used to protect people? It is an expensive exercise and beyond the means of all but the very rich to sue a mighty media organisation for libel, with no legal aid being available. Even stories that are horribly distorted and lampoon people unfairly can contain a modicum of truth, sufficient to enable the media's sharp-suited lawyers to bat away all but the most determined of litigants.
	Sadly, the Press Complaints Commission is of little use. More often than not, it reveals itself to be a toothless tiger and a self-congratulatory organisation that persistently fails those who seek its assistance. That means that the print press in particular is effectively free of regulation, despite the enormous power it wields over the perceptions we hold of the events and individuals that shape our lives. That is not a new problem. Even the military dictator Napoleon Bonaparte observed ruefully:
	"Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets".
	The pen is truly mightier than the sword when it is wielded by the media.
	I am not saying that the media should not pay for stories. I am not saying that people should not accept payment for selling their stories to the press. I am simply saying that the viewer or the reader or the listener should be told whether money has changed hands to put that story together, and if so how much. In this age of maximum disclosure and transparency, is it reasonable that the reader should any longer be denied that crucial information? My belief in more media disclosure is only one reason why I do not support the Bill that passed through this House last Friday, and I very much hope that it falls in the other place.
	I was interested to see in  The Mail on Sunday on29 April 2007 that at the end of an article entitled, "We loved each other like older people do", a disclaimer appeared stating that
	"Valerie Beech has received no payment for this interview."
	If  The Mail on Sunday believes that information to be relevant when no money has been paid for a story, why is it not relevant when money has been paid? Why not force all media by law to make that clear every time? Compare that example to the recent Lord Brown case. Was it right that it had to be dragged screaming and kicking from Associated Newspapers, days after the allegations about his private life were first unveiled, that his former friend Jeff Chevalier was paid substantial sums of money by Associated Newspapers over a significant period of time for his story? Surely, the very first time that that story broke we, the public, were entitled to be told that tens of thousands of pounds in cash or kind were paid to extract that expression of grief from a jilted lover.
	We live in an age when the media is immensely powerful. It can make or break careers and lives. The media have much more influence on Government policy, on how the country is run, than a humble Back Bencher like me. Indeed, the media have more influence than most junior Ministers. The rules for transparency and disclosure for elected representatives are stringent, and rightly so. We go on an overseas trip to view poverty in Malawi paid for by a charity and we are hounded if we do not disclose that fact. Sometimes, we hound each other over such trivial matters, and that is an issue on which we should all reflect.
	Remember the outrage that was rightly expressed in the media when it emerged years ago that at least one of our colleagues was willing to accept cash to ask questions in this House? We rightly took the view that such mercenary motivation was not to be tolerated in the nation's Parliament. However, we have this powerful beast prowling around our country trashing lives and pronouncing their judgments and the reader does not have the first idea about how their stories were obtained and how much blood money was paid for the destruction of a reputation. It is time to bring that to an end. It is time for more transparency.
	Naturally, the media must be allowed to protect its sources, and that is a principle we should respect. My Bill does not demand the disclosure of the source's identity, simply a sentence at the end of each broadcast or article stating whether or not the cheque book had been used, and if so how much. Then, the reader could make a better informed judgment about whether or not the story should be believed.
	There is a particular problem, which I do not have time fully to consider today, and it relates to the police. Many sensational headlines emanate from some police officers who, within five minutes of a celebrity arrest, are apparently on the phone to their favourite reporter shopping the person concerned for cash—a person who is innocent until proved guilty, as we should remember. It happens every day. The editor of  The Sun, Rebekah Wade, in her evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on 11 March 2003, admitted that newspapers pay the police for stories. Often that is illegal, but whether it is or not, the reader should be told when it happens. Perhaps that is a problem that should be tackled through other means.
	The eminent editor of  The Guardian newspaper,C. P. Scott, wrote in 1921 that
	"Comment is free, but facts are sacred".
	That is a seminal statement of the values of a free press. Somewhere along the journey from 1921 to today, that concept of a news media in which facts are sacred has mutated into "entertainment is king", and on that modern altar, private lives and public reputations are sacrificed for 24 hours of amusement and titillation. The spirit of C. P. Scott has been lost and with it trust in that vital and serious pillar of our democracy. I believe that my Bill, far from harming the media, can help to restore lost confidence in a noble profession.
	Let us celebrate the robust and vivid character of the fourth estate, but let the media be sensational and responsible in equal measure. Let them work within the framework of disclosure and transparency with which all of the rest of us have to comply. Let us be told—did they pay for that story, and if so, how much? I commend my Bill to the House.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Gary Streeter, Angela Browning, Sir George Young, Dr. Tony Wright, Mr. Frank Field, Mr. Tom Clarke, Mr. Colin Breed, Mr. David Curry, Mrs. Janet Dean, Mr. David Burrowes, Mr. Greg Pope and Ms Karen Buck.

David Mundell: I beg to move,
	That this House considers that the rejection of 146,097 votes in the constituency and regional elections to the Scottish Parliament, the equivalent of over 1,000,000 in a UK general election, to be totally unacceptable and an affront to democracy; notes that the number of rejected ballots exceeds the winning majority in several constituencies and that different formats of the regional ballot paper were used in different parts of Scotland; further notes that serious concerns have been raised about the issuing of postal ballots for the elections and the electronic equipment and processes used for counting votes; further notes that repeated advice not to hold the local government elections under the newly introduced single transferable vote system onthe same day as the Scottish Parliament elections was ignoredby the Scotland Office and the then Scottish Executive; calls upon the Secretary of State for Scotland to accept responsibility for the failures in the conduct of the Scottish Parliament elections and to apologise to the people of Scotland; further notes that the Electoral Commission is to carry out an inquiry, but considers that such an inquiry should be independent of the Commission, which had a significant role in the conduct of the elections, if public confidence in the electoral process in Scotland is to be restored; and accordingly further calls upon the Government, working in conjunction with the Scottish Executive, to instigate such an inquiry.
	It would be remiss of me not to use this first opportunity to congratulate the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) on his appointment as First Minister of Scotland and to wish him and his new Scottish Executive well as they discharge the responsibilities devolved to the Scottish Parliament. As I have said before, I believe that the Secretary of State for Scotland will rue the Government's failure over eight years to put in place appropriate mechanisms for dialogue and interaction between London and Edinburgh. However, that debate is for another day. I understand that today the First Minister is expected to make a statement on his programme for government. I shall watch with interest to see whether he makes any reference to the conduct of the Scottish elections, given his previous support for an independent inquiry.
	The House will recall the statement made by the Secretary of State on 8 May about the conduct of the Scottish parliamentary elections. That statement proved to be wholly inadequate, not least becausethe Secretary of State failed to take responsibility for the conduct of the elections. He also failed to give the apology to the people of Scotland that I, and many on both sides of the House, demanded. I could not have agreed more with the hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Devine) when he described the conduct of the elections as "an embarrassment" and added:
	"we owe the people of Scotland an apology."—[ Official Report, 8 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 33.]
	That apology is still not forthcoming. Instead, the Secretary of State has sought to use the Jack McConnell approach to the cost of the Scottish Parliament: everybody is to blame, so nobody is to blame.

Alistair Carmichael: But the hon. Gentleman has to explain to the House why he concludes that just because Ron Gould has been appointed by the Electoral Commission he cannot be independent of the commission. Is the hon. Gentleman saying that there is some connection between Mr. Gould and the Electoral Commission that puts a question over his impartiality or independence? If he cannot provide such evidence, the logic of his position is that if the Scotland Office appoints somebody to conduct an inquiry, that person will not be independent either.

David Mundell: I must make some progress, because we have a limited time for the debate.
	There can be little doubt that the presentation of candidate names and party logos was compromisedon many ballot papers. There was an attempt to accommodate the names of too many candidates on a defined size of ballot paper. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the elderly and people with sight problems, in particular, struggled with the instructions. Worse still, ballot papers issued at polling stations in Glasgow and Lothian did not resemble the sample papers previously shown to parties. It is a fundamental tenet of our democracy that a person voting in Shetland, for example, has the same format of ballot as a fellow citizen voting in Linlithgow. It is now clear that ballot papers across Scotland lacked uniformity. We regard that as entirely unacceptable—on a par with Florida's hanging chads.
	As I voted in Moffat, I naively assumed that people voting in Edinburgh or Glasgow would be presented with the same form of ballot paper, but I was wrong. In the regions of Glasgow and Lothian, ballot papers had different instructions from ballot papers in other areas of Scotland. The arrows telling people in which columns to put their crosses were removed. Not surprisingly, those two regions recorded the highest number of rejected ballots: a staggering 7.85 per cent. in Glasgow and 5.2 per cent. in the Lothians. Only an independent inquiry can get to the bottom of those kinds of decisions.
	We need to know from the Secretary of State how decisions were made on the final design and layout of ballot papers. Did he see the final variations in the ballot papers for all constituencies and regions across Scotland? Did he sign off the decision to remove the instructional arrows from the ballot papers in the Glasgow and Lothian regions? More importantly, what level of consultation did he undertake with political parties, candidates, returning officers, DRS and the Electoral Commission before making the decision? Why did he give precedence to the electronic counting process rather than to candidates and electors? I have no doubt that if market research had been undertaken on the final ballots, they would have been rejected outright—had the research documentation been read by the Secretary of State.
	No doubt the use of e-counting in the elections played a major role in the decisions to change ballot papers. Electronic counting was introduced as a means to an end. It was adopted initially, it was said, to shorten the amount of time taken to count local ballots, because counting votes manually under the new STV system would take days rather than hours. But it is quite clear that e-counting became a means in itself in Edinburgh and Glasgow, where, instead of altering the ballot papers by deleting instructional information, there should have been a manual count if the machines could not cope.
	The willingness to change fundamental aspects of the election process to suit the needs of electronic counting and DRS—its operator—has compromised the integrity of the electoral process. We must ask ourselves the serious question of whether, after these events, e-counting can give everyone the confidence that the election count is being carried out appropriately. Many candidates complained in the media that they had no idea of the outcome of their election until a few minutes before it was announced—unlike what happens with the traditional hand count.
	May I deal briefly with postal ballots? Every right hon. and hon. Member from Scotland will have heard from constituents who were unable to vote owing to the late arrival of postal ballots. That is simply administrative incompetence striking at the heart of the democratic process. We may never know how many electors were disfranchised by the postal vote debacle, which saw probably hundreds of people unable to return their ballots in time. It is ironic that postal votes arrived on polling day and that the only way to make them count was to take them to the polling station—if the elector was lucky enough to be at home to receive that vote. The Government have always known about, and encouraged, the trend of more and more people opting for a postal vote. The election date was hardly a surprise and there is no excuse for not putting arrangements in place to guarantee that, at least from an administrative perspective, postal voters received their postal ballots on time.
	There can be no doubt that the Government had a genuine opportunity to work with the Scottish Executive to reduce the possibility of voter confusion. The key to that would have been to decouple the two elections, as many people advocated. That is the view not just of the Conservatives or the newly appointed Scottish Executive, but of the Government's own Arbuthnott commission, which recommended it. The Electoral Commission made the scale of the difficulties clear during the evidence that it gave to the Local Government and Transport Committee of the Scottish Parliament. The Arbuthnott commission summed up the arguments perfectly, saying that holding the elections on separate days would
	"reduce the complexity of voting, potentially reduce voter confusion and keep the number of invalid votes to a minimum. It would also reduce administrative complexity in the planning, management and counting of the elections, and enhance the transparency of the electoral process, especially allowing attention to be focussed on local issues."
	It is ridiculous of the Secretary of State and his predecessor to argue that only the Scottish Executive were responsible for the date of the local government elections, when obviously holding those elections on the same day would have an impact on the Scottish Parliament elections. He may have no influence with the Scottish Executive now, but he did then. When I was a Member of the Scottish Parliament, I introduced the Local Government Elections Bill to do just what I have been talking about, but Labour and Liberal Democrat Scottish Ministers thwarted constant attempts to get the Bill through. Conservatives in the Scottish Parliament will continue to pursue the cause and will look to the new Scottish Executive for support this time around.
	The high level of rejected ballot papers in the local council counts compared with the last elections—the level almost tripled—is also unacceptable. The system is certainly not the great triumph that the Electoral Reform Society or the Liberal Democrats would have us believe. The confusion, in terms of which councillor does what, has not even begun. Even if STV is accepted, what can be the purpose of holding such elections on the same day if, as was shown in the London mayoral elections and voting in Northern Ireland, having two separate systems in operation always exposes us to the risk of a disproportionately large number of people having their ballots rejected?

Douglas Alexander: May I offer the hon. Gentleman the opportunity to correct the factual error that he made in claiming that 140,000 people lost their votes? As I will demonstrate during my speech, if he were familiar with the situation in Scotland he would realise that he could not make that claim before the House with any authority.
	The hon. Gentleman's intervention was telling. During the speech made by the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell), I felt that opportunism was vying with statesmanship—and opportunism won. He simultaneously predetermined the outcome of the review and demanded that an independent inquiry be established, incidentally by the Government, no doubt in consort with the Scottish Executive. The problem for the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) is that after just the introductory Front-Bench speech, the Conservative party's argument, as set out in the motion, is in severe danger of collapsing under the weight of its contradictions.

Douglas Alexander: I am happy to answer the hon. Gentleman's questions. The Cragg Ross Dawson report was produced not by an individual, but by a company. It was commissioned by people in the Scotland Office, who had requested that work be undertaken through the Electoral Commission. The report was sent to the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, my hon. Friend the Member for Inverclyde (David Cairns), with whom I discussed the matter. It formed part of a consultation exercise that received 28 responses, along with three further responses that, technically, arrived after the consultation had concluded. We took account of the responses when we reached our decisions. I then had the opportunity to receive from officials a summary of the conclusions of all the consultation responses that we received, including work commissioned by the Electoral Commission. I discussed the report with the Under-Secretary and officials before making decisions.
	The House established the independent Electoral Commission and gave it a duty to carry out statutory reviews of elections. As I said, only when we have sight of its report will it be appropriate to determine the next steps to take. Let me remind the House of the remit of the commission and point out why I believe it is only sensible to let it get on with its job before deciding what further steps might be necessary.
	The Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 established the Electoral Commission and tasked it with, among other things, the job of reviewing the conduct of elections and reporting back to both the Government and Parliament with its findings and recommendations. That duty was conferred on it by the House without dissent. So far, it has reported on general elections, European elections, the 2003 elections for the Scottish Parliament and elections for other devolved institutions.
	The commission's review of the 2007 Scottish parliamentary elections is under way. Before the elections, the Scottish Executive asked the commission to review, as it did in 2003, the conduct of the Scottish local government elections, for which the Executive have legislative competence. Frankly, that makes sense. The decision of the Scottish Parliament in 2002 to move the date of the local government elections so that they could be held on the same day as the parliamentary elections had the effect of synchronising the elections.

David Marshall: May I follow up the important point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin) on the need to have public input to the review? Will my right hon. Friend consider the Scotland Office and the Scottish Executive running a joint advertising campaign to inform the public how they can have input to the review? There is likely to be next to no public input if no one knows how to do it.

Douglas Alexander: I did not make that claim in my previous statement and I will certainly not make it today. As in every other election, it is open to individual candidates who wish to challenge the veracity of a constituency result to do so by means of a petition to the electoral court; there is a period in which such an approach may be made. It is not for me to comment on individual results—that would not be appropriate. However, in the light of the right hon. Gentleman's question, I do reflect on the fact that, had I been minded to suggest a different type of review given the closeness of the result, I would have been subjected to heavy criticism by the Opposition for not being willing to accept the decision of the Scottish electors as manifested in the constituency and regional list results that emerged from the events of 3 and4 May.
	The Scotland Office—Ministers and civil servants—will co-operate with Mr. Gould's review. As I have said, Mr. Gould will be able to consider the points made in this afternoon's debate, and I am sure that Members of this House will want to submit evidence to the review. Although the commission has said that it expects the review to report in summer, the time scale will ultimately be determined by Mr. Gould, who leads the review.

Jim Sheridan: Can my right hon. Friend assure the House that Mr. Gould and the inquiry team will have the opportunity to speak with senior management of Royal Mail? There seems to be some ambiguity about when people received—or did not receive—their ballot papers.

Douglas Alexander: My hon. Friend makes a fair point. One of the issues that the Electoral Commission identified for the statutory review and which I requested that the review consider is delays affecting postal ballots. It is not for me to speculate at the Dispatch Box today; I simply observe that there seem to have been different circumstances in those areas where there was difficulty with postal ballots and it seems entirely appropriate for the review team, if they are so minded, to make inquiries directly with Royal Mail, given its involvement in dispatching postal ballots.
	The commitment to impartiality demonstrated by the commission's announcement reinforces my belief that if I were to accede at this stage to the urgings of those who wish to establish a judicial or some other form of inquiry at the present time, we would be in the position of having two parallel investigations into precisely the same events examining the same issues, talking to the same people and reviewing the same decisions at the same time. That does not strike me as the most sensible course of action, particularly when the Electoral Commission has said that the review is expected to have completed its work in just over12 weeks' time. I believe that it is better to await the report and then to take decisions informed by its findings and recommendations.
	After the elections on 3 May, I came to the House at the first available opportunity to make a statement on the conduct of the elections in the light of public concern. In that statement, I set out in detail the problems that occurred and the issues that needed to be addressed. Briefly, they are: delays in the sending out of postal ballots; difficulties with some of the electronic counting machines; the unacceptably high number of rejected ballot papers; and the decision to hold the two elections on the same day, especially given the new arrangements for local authority elections. Those matters are now being investigated by Mr. Gould and his team.
	I am aware that a number of colleagues are keen to speak today and time is short, so I shall not repeat all the detail that I set out in my statement. However, because I am sure that the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire would never intend inadvertently to misspeak in the House of Commons, I am keen to clarify exactly what I said about the number of rejected votes in the course of the exchanges following my statement. I said:
	"a final tally is still to be reached on the number of spoiled papers".—[ Official Report, 8 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 29.]
	At that time, the final authoritative figures were in the process of being collated. There has been much speculation about the level of rejected votes—figures of 5, 7 and 10 per cent. have been quoted in the press and elsewhere—but the actual figures have now been published. Across the regional and constituency sections, 3.47 per cent. of the total votes cast in the Scottish Parliament elections were rejected. That breaks down as 60,454 rejected papers in the regional vote, representing 2.88 per cent. of the total votes cast in that section; and 85,643 rejected papers in the constituency vote, representing 4.07 per cent. of the total votes cast in that section. The level of rejected papers and the problems encountered with e-counting and the administration of postal votes are subjects of Mr. Gould's review.

Stewart Hosie: The right hon. Gentleman mentioned some of the terms of reference for the Electoral Commission's statutory review. Obviously, I would like there to be an independent review, but I nevertheless welcome the initiative whereby information officers were placed at polling stations. However, there is anecdotal evidence that in the council ballot, those officers advised people to put an X by each of their three choices, rather than to put 1, 2 or 3 by their names. The advice given by information officers on the day may have been wrong; could that be considered as an important part of the review?

Douglas Alexander: One of the striking features of the authoritative figures that I have just shared with the House is that the regional vote, which for the first time appeared on the left-hand side of the joint ballot paper—that, of course, is a matter of contention—had significantly fewer rejected votes than the constituency section of the ballot paper, which was on the right-hand side of the paper. In that sense, it is entirely relevant for the independent review, if it is so minded, to consider that issue. It is at least possible that in a certain number of cases, people were determined to vote for a particular party on the regional list section of the ballot paper, and were determined not to vote for any candidate on the constituency section. I do not for a minute suggest that that explains the scale of the number of rejected papers, but it has been suggested, at least anecdotally, that there may have been individuals who, for example, were determined to vote for the Green party on the regional list, but who decided not to vote in the constituency section. That is a matter that will need to be considered by the independent review.

Oliver Heald: I do not quite get the right hon. Gentleman's maths; 140,000 votes were lost, but he is saying that the figure is somehow less than 140,000, because the votes were in two different categories. How many people is he saying were disfranchised?

Douglas Alexander: I will come on to the issue of the design of the paper and the responsibility for the variations in design across the country; that issue was rehearsed by the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, who spoke for the Opposition, and was referred to at least implicitly in the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Livingston (Mr. Devine).

Douglas Alexander: I have been generous in giving way, and now I will make a little more progress. A key concern of the Arbuthnott commission was the need to enhance the understanding of the regional vote, which we have just been discussing. The process that led from the Arbuthnott commission first drawing attention to the combined ballot paper model used in the New Zealand elections to the final design was inclusive and consensual. Consultation was extensive and detailed. As I have already told the House, there were 29 responses to that consultation, and three late responses were also taken into account. Political parties, voters, election administrators, representatives of disabled peoples' organisations and all other interested parties wereconsulted.
	Under the terms of the Scotland Act 1998, I am responsible for laying before Parliament the orders that set the statutory requirements for ballot papers for elections to the Scottish Parliament. Those requirements are set out in the Scottish Parliamentary Elections (Returning Officers' Charges) Order 2007, which was approved by both Houses, without Division, in March this year. As in other elections, including general elections, returning officers have statutory responsibility for implementing the rules covered in the elections order, and have scope to alter the design of the ballot papers, provided that they do not diverge from those statutory requirements. Those are all matters that will be covered in Mr. Gould's report, so the Government amendment asks the House to allow him to do the job for which he is well qualified. When he has finished his task, we will be able to take stock and form a view about what further action is necessary. A statutory review led by an independent expert is already under way. The Government have made it clear that they will co-operate with the review and will consider whether further action is necessary. It is expected that the review will be concluded in just over 12 weeks' time. I ask the House to support the Government's amendment.

Jo Swinson: I start by joining in the congratulations to the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) on his recent election to the post of First Minister. I just wish that he were here so that I could offer those congratulations to him in person. We will have to hope that he is an avid reader of  Hansard and still has the time to keep up with what is happening in the House.
	We were all appalled as we watched events unfold on the night of 3 May, and in the early hours of the following morning. The mess of the rejected ballot papers, the electronic counting problems and the delayed counts were certainly, as the motion says, "an affront to democracy". Since the election, there has been time for reflection on those events, and we have gained a certain amount of knowledge in that time. We now know just how many people lost their vote on 3 May. We know that an Electoral Commission inquiry led by Ron Gould will look into the conduct of the elections, and we know that the Secretary of State still is not taking full responsibility for the fiasco. However, there is still much to discuss, and that is why I welcome the debate.

Jo Swinson: I welcome the hon. Lady's intervention, and her warning, which I am sure was kindly meant. We certainly welcome the review, as we stated in the Liberal Democrat amendment, which was tabled but not selected. Obviously, many Members of the House have views on the Scottish elections, and as has already been said, I am sure that Ron Gould will be taking special notice of this debate and the experiences that hon. Members will want to share. The opportunity to share those experiences was perhaps more limited when the Secretary of State for Scotland made his statement on 8 May. This is an important time to bring up the issues that hon. Members of all parties have mentioned; I believe that that will be helpful to the inquiry.
	Obviously, the purpose of the inquiry is to ensure that mistakes are not repeated. Some mistakes can be forgiven, but failing to learn from them cannot be forgiven. We need to look in detail at the circumstances surrounding the selecting of the ballot paper design. We need to ask why problems occurred, not only with the e-counting. but with the postal vote; clearly, that should have been one of the least troublesome aspects of the election. It was the one part that we were already used to, as it had been used in previous elections. We need to ask whether, as the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) suggested, decoupling the Scottish and local elections would succeed in reducing voter confusion while maintaining turnout levels.
	On the issue of spoiled ballot papers, as has been said, there were 15 constituencies in which the winning Scottish National party's majority was smaller than the number of rejected ballots. As has been pointed out, the highest difference was in Edinburgh East and Musselburgh. Interestingly enough, the second highest difference was in Glasgow Govan, where the number of spoiled ballot papers was greater than the majority by 1,106. Like others, I do not want to call the election result into question, but it is worrying that the figures provide a sound basis for those who want to do so. Whatever people's views on that, it is certainly true that the high levels of spoiled papers undermine the public's faith in the electoral system. We need to put that right.
	The single ballot paper commanded general support among political parties and other organisations that were consulted in the run-up to designing it. In Committee, a draft ballot paper was circulated and we discussed how clear it would be for voters. However, two issues need to be raised: first, how it was tested; and secondly, the difference between it and the ballot papers in Glasgow and Edinburgh. As has been mentioned, the testing was carried out by a company called Cragg Ross Dawson. That involved 100 people being interviewed and asked their views on five different ballot paper designs. Interestingly, the single ballot paper was the most popular, as the Minister said in Committee.
	Looking in more detail at what happened in the testing process, 7 per cent. of the test subjects mistakenly spoiled their ballot paper. The Secretary of State gave the figures for spoilage in the different elections. If one combines them, it could be 140,000 individuals, although I accept that it is impossible for us to find out exactly how many individuals spoiled their ballots without compromising voter privacy.

Jo Swinson: I accept that. As I said a moment ago, there was acceptance on both sides of the Committee that a single ballot paper was the best way to proceed. We all believed that and are dismayed by what has happened. That is why it is important to have the inquiry to find out what could have been done differently. I urge Ron Gould, in the conduct of his inquiry, to investigate thoroughly why, after that level of testing, the Electoral Commission did not then probe further, conduct further tests and see how the spoilage rate could have been reduced. That may well be instructive for what to do in future.
	How hands on were the Secretary of State and the Minister with the testing process? In terms of making the decision, I can understand their saying that it was the most popular option, but it would have been fairer to say that it is likely to have a higher spoilage rate. Will they publish any correspondence and communication that they had with the Electoral Commission so that it can be in the public domain and everyone in this House and among the public is able to see what went on?
	The spoilage rates in Glasgow and Edinburgh areof particular concern, because of the top 10 constituencies with high spoilage rates, seven were in Glasgow and Edinburgh. About 1,000 more papers were spoiled there than in the next nearest region. As a voter in East Dunbartonshire, I did not realise until after the election that a different ballot paper had been issued for Glasgow and Edinburgh. I understand that that was because there was a problem with fitting all the names on to the ballot paper that had been drafted. I have seen an example of the one used in Glasgow, which seems to have 23 different parties contesting the regional list side of it. The ballot paper does not have the clear arrow design that was shown to us in Committee. It has information at the top of it, but not the very obvious arrows pointing to the columns where the individual would need to vote. I can understand why it was more confusing. Indeed, the spoilage rates were on average 2 per cent. higher in Glasgow and Edinburgh than in the rest of Scotland, so there is good evidence that it led to confusion. The Secretary of State said that this is just a matter for returning officers and that he had nothing to do with it. However, when we were shown in Committee the draft ballot paper design with arrows on it, we were all led to believe that that was how it would be designed. That was at the beginning of March. When was the decision made to change it? Did the Secretary of State know about the change? Did he approve of it? Could not the need for it have been foreseen? There would have been room on the ballot paper to include the arrows, so why was that not done?

Jo Swinson: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but I must correct him. My party's objective is not to get minority parties represented but to get the election result to reflect the way that people voted so that everyone's vote counts. That is hugely important to the credibility of the voting system. I do not accept that the PR voting system was the problem. Indeed, we had the same system for the Scottish Parliament elections in 2003, and it was not a problem. The single transferable vote system that was implemented this year had a much lower spoilage rate than the Scottish Parliament system. That points to its success and clarity. It was easy for people to understand how to rank in order of preference, as opposed to the confusion caused by the spoiled ballot papers.

Simon Hughes: Does my hon. Friend agree that, although there may be a case for ensuring that local and national elections are on a different day so that people can vote locally on local issues, the elections that we are considering definitely make a case for all elections in the UK to be on a 1-2-3 basis so that people have the same system, whatever the forum for which they are voting?

Jo Swinson: Yes, perhaps unsurprisingly I agreewith my hon. Friend that a preferential voting system—1-2-3—is easy for people to do and means that their vote counts. [Hon Members: "What about 4?"] Let me make some progress— [Interruption.]

Jo Swinson: I hope that the Government will think again about introducing STV for the Scottish Parliament elections.
	The Conservative motion also deals with the Secretary of State's failure to accept responsibility for the elections. He has been remiss in that. We want to hear the outcome of the inquiry but we also need to hear an apology from the Secretary of State, who is responsible for the elections. People in Scotland are understandably annoyed about what has happened and about their votes not being counted.
	Let us consider the e-counting. One of the problems was the involvement of private companies in the counting service. DRS has been involved in various election problems, not only in the Scottish elections. It apparently tested the machinery, which, according to the Secretary of State, did not predict any of the major problems. However, I understand from the Edinburgh  Evening News that e-counting was introduced for the Scottish Parliament and local council elections at a cost of £8.8 million. I presume that most of the money went to the company. I do not know whether the full details of the contracts are under confidentiality agreements, but it would be useful to know exactly how much the company was paid for running the elections.
	Some penalty clauses in the contract may be invoked so that the company might have to pay back thousands of pounds where problems occurred with the counts. However, a few thousand pounds out of a contract of £8.8 million constitutes getting off lightly given the chaos that ensued. I would welcome more details about the contracts and exactly how harsh the penalty clauses were. Clearly, the motivation for the companies to ensure that they got it right on the night was inadequate. Some of us who were sitting in television studios in the early hours of the morning saw that they blatantly did not get it right.
	I welcome the appointment of Ron Gould to head the inquiry. He is clearly one of the world's foremost experts on the matter and has great experience in elections internationally. I was intrigued by the Opposition motion's words on that. Sadly, the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale would not take an intervention on the subject. As my hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) said, if the Electoral Commission cannot appoint someone independently, who doesthe hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale suppose should do the appointing? If the inquiry will not be independent if the Scotland Office or the Electoral Commission nominate somebody, does he want the Conservative party to stipulate who will be independent? I suspect that it will not be easy to hold an independent inquiry under his definition if an independent, international election expert does not fit the bill in his view. His argument is flawed.
	The hon. Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin) made a point about the public's input into the inquiry. I agree that it is essential to get the views of real voters who found problems with the ballot system. Frankly, we may not get that if we simply rely on people coming forward to the inquiry. Ron Gould needs to be proactive about seeking out people's experiences.
	To conclude, the elections were a fiasco from start to finish. Many thousands of voters were disfranchised by the postal vote delay and the spoiled ballots, which ran to 140,000.

Eric Joyce: The hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) started by congratulating the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) on his new appointment. It would perhaps be churlish of me not to do the same, but it occurs to me that there is sometimes a place for a bit of churlishness in politics. Let me embody that for a moment.
	The hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire(Jo Swinson) has referred to the fact that we are not likely to see a great deal of the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan down here. He is a busy man—he is running Scotland for the moment, for however long that might be—and we will observe carefully how often he represents his constituents in this Chamber.

Angus MacNeil: On a point of information, may I point out to thehon. Gentleman that Westminster is not running Zimbabwe's elections, although it did run Scotland's elections.

Ann McKechin: I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman on that point. I am aware that at least two of the so-called political parties were simply the creations of one individual, and that one was used to promote an individual's own publication. Standingfor elections to the Scottish Parliament involves considerable public expenditure on freepost, and it should be based on serious intent. I believe that candidates should show an appropriate number of supporting nominations. That would not exclude genuine, serious independent candidates.
	The prior publicity about the changes in the voting systems was poor. The detailed instructions arrived along with an avalanche of election literature and probably ended up in many cases going straight into the bin. They came too late and were not sufficiently embedded in the general public's knowledge. Again, I would question the apparent lack of work on voters who are difficult to reach. The instructions on completion for postal voters contained a number of disparities.
	"You have only one vote in the council ballot"
	is clearly not an accurate way to describe numbering under STV, and there was a total absence of advice for voters about how many councillors per area were being voted for. Why do we keep the voters in ignorance?
	In the council elections where parties fielded more than one candidate per area, there were repeated incidences of forms containing two or three crosses against candidates rather than numbers, and in almost every case, a candidate's chance of being elected was substantially increased if the initial letter of their surname was near the beginning of the alphabet.
	I am astonished that the Electoral Reform Society should have declared the council elections a success. The rejection rate was high, and candidate selection in highly marginal areas being determined by their position in the alphabet cannot be seen to be progressive. There was no increase in the numbers of women or ethnic minority councillors. In fact, we probably ended up with fewer, including the loss in my own constituency of the sole Asian female councillor in Scotland. There was no significant increase in turnout, and despite the fact that, like myself, members of all the main political parties spent a lot of time trying to inform voters about the changes, many people were baffled by their consequences, including losing the long-cherished ability to vote out an unpopular representative.
	This is not the time for shouting the odds at each other and spouting media soundbites. We all have a degree of responsibility for this result. The voters lost out and anyone who is interested in democracy needs closely to examine what went wrong and truly listen to the electorate before we make further changes. They deserve no less.

Angus Robertson: I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin). I hope that any investigation to be conducted by the Electoral Commission or commissioned by the Scottish Executive will look closely at all the points that she has raised. I concur with almost every one of them.
	I am pleased that, among the contributions that we have heard this afternoon, there has been little doubt—I cannot say "no doubt"—cast on the result of the elections. Not only did the SNP win, but all the United Kingdom parties lost seats. I thank leading members of all the UK parties for their regular visits to Scotland, which were very beneficial to the SNP's campaign.
	As we speak, the SNP Government and the First Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond), are setting out priorities for the new Administration in the Scottish Parliament. I hope Members in all parts of the House will wish that Government well, but today, here, we are discussing the technical problems associated with the polls rather than the result—although I am certain that the SNP majorities and gains could have been more significant than they were, given the national swing.
	There has been mention of elections in other countries. This is one of the reasons why I feel so strongly about the debacle that we experienced in Scotland. In the past, many of us who spend time in countries that are emerging democracies have been able to say with great pride and absolute confidence, regardless of our politics, that we are in no doubt about the result of a particular election. I have sometimes found it hard to listen to politicians or political party activists in other parts of the world explain their difficulties and lack of trust. We all know of countries where the degree of coercion is great. As the problems in Scotland have shown, however, something extraordinarily minor can cause the great problems that we have seen. Certainly I cannot imagine that any politician in Scotland or the rest of the UK would scoff at the electoral problems suffered by Florida a few years ago.

Angus Robertson: The hon. Lady has made her own point in her own way. Perhaps she will reflect on that later.
	Before 3 May, it was apparent that there were serious problems. A number of Members have drawn attention to the problems of constituents who had applied for postal votes. I experienced difficulties myself: my postal vote only arrived on Monday. In my area, council workers were out delivering postal votes by hand—I do not know whether they were scuttling around in taxis—to ensure that they arrived. For those working offshore, they arrived too late and people were disfranchised, which is completely unacceptable.
	It was not however only the issue of postal votes that gave cause for alarm in advance. On 7 March 2007, my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr. MacNeil) told the delegated committee dealing with Scottish parliamentary elections
	"At first glance, the statement on the example ballot paper, 'You have two votes', could be misleading."
	Other Members have made that point as well. Before the elections, similar problems were drawn to the attention of the Arbuthnott commission. The SNP's submission stated:
	"Certainly, having entirely different voting systems for elections on the same day leaves the door open to confusion... If both systems were to be used on one day, then a great deal of voter education would be essential."
	Most tellingly, the SNP said:
	"There will be new arrangements in... the local government elections. That will mean a vote using STV, and, as previously stated, unless the same system is introduced for the Scottish Parliament election on the same day, or those two elections are decoupled, then there is every chance that confusion will be a factor in those elections."
	That confusion did, of course, come about.
	The SNP also made a submission to the Scottish Electoral Commission. A letter from Peter Murrell, the SNP chief executive, raised three points with Andy O'Neill, head of the commission, two of which were ignored completely. Those were not the only warnings, but I want to put it on record that warnings were passed to a number of relevant authorities before the elections.
	All of us SNP spokespeople were sitting in the BBC Scotland studio as the surreal events unfolded. I do not know how long colleagues were told they would have to stay in their seats and keep things going until they were replaced by elected MSP colleagues. I was told two hours, but I sat there for five hours before I was finally relieved and left the studio—it was just after a number of fantastic SNP gains. However, during that time we learned not only about the problems as they were being reported—there were literally thousands of spoiled ballot papers—but about something else, which the hon. Member for Falkirk (Mr. Joyce) reminded me of: the extraordinary scene of a DRS spokesperson almost laughing off what was happening when addressing anybody involved in the political process, including the politicians and the pundits involved in the programme. As we witnessed that we thought, "My goodness, she has absolutely no idea how serious the situation is."
	Although the SNP regularly makes the point that we do not want to tell the good people of England how they should make their own arrangements, I strongly advise the Greater London authority and Mayor Ken Livingstone to take a careful look at the electoral experience that we in Scotland had. London had its own problems in its first elections—which I understand DRS was also involved in—but I hope that it does not go through what we in Scotland have just had to go through.
	The motion discusses the inquiry issue. I am pleased that the Scottish Cabinet yesterday discussed that. First Minister Salmond and his colleagues are looking into that; he remains committed to an inquiry taking place, and the details will be announced in due course. However, I and my party colleagues have a problem with what the Opposition motion calls for in terms of an inquiry. I intervened to try to get clarification from the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) on who should initiate an inquiry. It is inconsistent to be against the Electoral Commission being in charge of the inquiry and then to call on the UK Government to conduct it, because we know what their role and that of the Scotland Office in this matter was. That is why the SNP will not support the Opposition motion. We will support the Scottish Executive.

Angus Robertson: Some people might be interestedin a re-run. Owing to the popularity of the new Government, I am certain that the SNP majority would increase—even seats close to the hon. Gentleman's constituency that we just failed to win would fall within our grasp. No serious case is being made for re-running the election, and I do not think that the electorate—whatever their political views—would encourage that.
	I will conclude shortly, as other Members wish to speak, but I first wish to raise a couple of matters to do with the Secretary of State for Scotland. He was right to warn Members against mis-speaking in terms of what is said in the House. He went on to quote from his own contribution of 8 May 2007. I am keen not to mis-speak it, but it should be put on the record that he read out half a sentence of what he said, stopping at the point where there is a comma. Therefore, it will be useful if I now read out the whole sentence. He read out:
	"I urge caution on two fronts. First, a final tally is still to be reached on the number of spoiled papers"—
	and there he stopped. The rest of that sentence reads
	"but according to the information that I received this morning, it does not reach 100,000."—[ Official Report, 8 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 29W.]
	As we know, there were more than 100,000 and we should not try to talk down the seriousness of this situation.
	I shall conclude by repeating the questions I asked the Secretary of State on 8 May. I am repeating them because I did not get an answer to them, and I would like to have an answer now. I asked whether the Electoral Commission warned the Secretary of State of concerns about the design of the ballot paper. When the ballot paper size became apparent, did he decide that all must appear on one page? At the end of the ballot design phase, was there any further testing? I then asked him to publish all relevant ministerial correspondence.
	It is important for all those questions to be answered and to be a matter of public record. Frankly, the Secretary of State's contribution was underwhelming—much like his initial statement—and he seemed to be saying, "Not me, guv", rather than anything else. It is not good enough. Thank goodness we now have a Scottish Executive who will treat this issue with the seriousness that it deserves, unlike the UK Government, who are running away from their responsibilities.

Oliver Heald: It has been a good debate, which has been welcomed on both sides of the House as an opportunity to raise serious concerns. On both sides of the House, there is a recognition that there needs to be a proper inquiry into what went on. Some 146,097 votes were lost. The Secretary of State admits that he does not know how many people that represents, but one thing is for sure—it could represent that very number. The Secretary of State, however, is not able to tell us.
	The hon. Member for Falkirk (Mr. Joyce) described the election as having been conducted more badly than the Congo's, and my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) talked about the "hanging chads" situation in America; those comments show how badly wrong the Scottish election went. Although I fully understand that the Secretary of State wants to wait for his inquiry, the fact is that when 146,000 votes go missing, there should be an apology from those responsible.
	The elections involved two separate voting systems, so they were always going to be difficult. The hon. Member for Crawley (Laura Moffatt) made that point, as did others; I do not think that she is too keen on the single transferable vote system. Whatever one's perspective, there is no doubt that, as the hon. Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin) said, it was never going to be easy for electors to deal with two different kinds of electoral process on the same day. Whatever one says about the Electoral Commission, it was given a difficult task in the run-up to the elections.
	The Government and the Scottish Executive were warned. The Arbuthnott commission made the clear recommendation that the elections should be decoupled because of the complexity, confusion and risk of invalid votes. It took the Government months to respond to that report. When we consider the warnings given by my hon. Friend the Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) in a Westminster Hall debate and in his Bill as an MSP in Edinburgh, we see that the problems did not happen by accident. When he was an MSP, my hon. Friend put forward a Bill in the Scottish Parliament that called for decoupling, and the Conservatives have been saying the same thing throughout —[Interruption.] I am talking about the Scottish Parliament, which this Government set up—that very place. I am sure that the Secretary of State has come across it at some time in Scotland.

Alistair Carmichael: I am not sure that you have, though.

Question accordingly negatived.
	 Question, That the proposed words be there added,  put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments), and agreed to.
	Madam Deputy Speaker  forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That this House notes that a statutory review of the Scottish Parliament elections is already underway conducted by the Electoral Commission as required by Parliament; further notes that, at the prior request of the then Scottish Executive, this review will also cover the Scottish local government elections; welcomes the appointment of an international authority on the management and organisation of elections, Mr Ron Gould,the former Assistant Chief Electoral Officer of Canada, to lead the review; further notes that his terms of reference include examining the role of the Electoral Commission in the preparation of the elections, as well as matters relating to postal ballot delays, the high number of rejected ballots, combining Scottish local government and Scottish parliamentary elections, and the electronic counting process; and believes that this statutory review which is now in progress should complete its report in order to inform decisions in relation to any further steps which may be necessary or appropriate.

John Gummer: That would not be a matter of importance were it not for the fact that the Secretaryof State for Health has personally made a number of statements about the wonders of the national health service, including the fact that is the best service that we have had, and she is being paid for it. I think that it is an unusual circumstance.

Andrew Lansley: I beg to move,
	That the salary of the Secretary of State for Health should be reduced by £1,000.
	The purpose of the motion is to force the resignation of the Secretary of State. I am sorry that it has come to that. Members on both sides of the House will know that we have frequently used the time available to the official Opposition in the House to raise a series of NHS and health-related issues. We have done so on health care-acquired infections, mental health, the NHS work force and planning, and the management of the health service, always on the basis of motions that are constructive and designed to support the national health service. However, NHS staff have reached the end of the line with the Secretary of State. Serial incompetence and a chronic failure to listen to those staff mean that she has no credibility left to resolve the imminent problems facing the national health service. It is not simply that she and the rest of the Government are paralysed by the non-election campaign of the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr. Brown). The fact is that even were she to remain as Secretary of State after a change in prime ministership, she cannot command the necessary confidence and support across the national health service.
	Many Members will recall the matters that we have raised before. Let me reiterate the many serial failures for which the Secretary of State has been responsible over the past two years. In 2005, there was the botched reorganisation of primary care trusts, which led within months to the resignation of Nigel Crisp, now Lord Crisp, as chief executive of the NHS. Under this Secretary of State, we saw the NHS plunge into its largest ever deficit. Since May 2005, the number of staff— [ Interruption . ] Labour Members are always telling us—the Prime Minister did it again at Prime Minister's questions today—how many additional staff have been recruited by the Labour Government. Of course, those include 107,000 administrators. When the Prime Minister says, "There have been 250,000 extra staff", funnily enough he never goes on to say, "of whom 107,000 were administrators."
	However, we are focusing on the record of the Secretary of State. Since May 2005, the number of staff working in the national health service has fallen. Payment by results and the tariff—a critical element of NHS reform—collapsed in February 2006, weeks before the start of the financial year in which the NHS plunged into its largest ever deficit. In payment by results and the tariff, we have a system that is necessary but is not being delivered successfully.  [ Interruption . ] The Minister for the Cabinet Office says, "Ah!" as if it is some kind of mystery. "Money follows the patient" was a policy advocated by the last Conservative Government; it took years for the Labour Government to get round to recognising it, exactly as happened with GP fundholding and market mechanisms inside the NHS.

Andrew Lansley: The hon. Gentleman does not seem to understand that last year a deficit of more than £1 billion within the NHS masked a deficit in excess of £2 billion within the Department of Health as a whole. That scale of increase has never happened before. The hon. Gentleman and other Labour Members probably often sit there wondering why, in the year just gone, their primary care trusts have had so much of their money topsliced in order to deal with that deficit. Why did that happen if the deficit is so modest? Why £1.5 billion out of PCT budgets? Why £350 million out of education and training budgets? Why hundreds of millions extra out of the central budgets of the Department of Health? It is all because in the previous year there was not only a gross deficit of £1.3 billion within NHS trusts but an unprecedented scale of overspending within the Department.

Andrew Miller: Unfortunately no Conservative Member who is present today attended a meeting that I had the honour to chair last night to discuss the NHS IT programme. Let me pass on two figures from that. This week, the picture archiving and communications system stored 6,200,000 images, making a total of 237 million images stored on the system. The hon. Gentleman calls that a failure—he should get his facts right and learn a little bit about IT.

Andrew Lansley: I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman shortly but let me tell him something else if he is interested in the IT programme. He will remember that, 10 days ago, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said that we had to deliver the electronic transfer of prescriptions. By the end of 2005, 50 per cent. of prescriptions were supposed to be delivered electronically. By now, the figure should have approached 100 per cent. Yet the last quarter for which figures are available shows that 4 per cent. of prescriptions were transferred electronically. Actually, it is worse than that: about 4,500,000 prescriptions were issued electronically, but only just over 1 per cent. of those issued could be dispensed electronically, because bar codes had not been fitted to them, and pharmacists did not have access to the necessary equipment.

Meg Hillier: It is instructive about the pace of change in the health service that, in 1997, people were waiting two years to even get an operation. They might be waiting now, but only for improvements in what is already a damned sight better service than we had10 years ago.

Andrew Lansley: If we look at the hospital episode statistics, I acknowledge that the proportion of patients waiting less than six months for operations increased from 84 per cent. in 1997 to 90 per cent. in 2006. Given that NHS budgets have tripled, however, that is not exactly a triumph.
	The flu vaccine implementation has been delayed twice in each of the past two years, and the Government have now missed the WHO's target for delivering flu vaccine to over-65-year-olds. When the Secretary of State took up her position, she said that hospital-acquired infections would be her priority. What has she done about it? We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of deaths associated with MRSA and clostridium difficile, and horrendous outbreaks of C. difficile in a number of hospitals across the country, including in her constituency.
	We have also seen the Secretary of State in the humiliating position of having to admit, in early December, that whereas Ministers said that 99 per cent. of patients were admitted to single-sex accommodation, some people might still be getting admitted to mixed- sex wards. She asked for a report from health authorities across the country. It took her six months to admit, because the Healthcare Commission survey was going to present it anyway, that 22 per cent. of patients admitted to hospital were first admitted to mixed-sex wards. That was a complete failure on something that, as her Prime Minister said in 1996, cannot be beyond the wit of Government to achieve.

Andrew Lansley: I am going to make some progress.
	The latest and one of the most serious failures of the Secretary of State has been the disaster of the medical training application scheme. The Royal College of Physicians called it
	"the worst episode in the history of medical training in the UK in living memory".
	James Johnson, who has resigned as chairman of the British Medical Association, described the policy failures—failure to estimate the number of applicants correctly; failure to put in place a fair selection process by adopting selection criteria and a scoring system that undermined the principles of Modernising Medical Careers; failure to implement the technology in terms of its security or its functionality. Furthermore, Mr. Justice Goldring said in the High Court this afternoon:
	"The fact that the claimant"—
	Remedy UK—
	"has failed in what was accepted to be an unprecedented application so far as the law is concerned does not mean that many junior doctors do not have an entirely justifiable sense of grievance. The premature introduction of MTAS has had disastrous consequences. It was a flawed system."
	That is a flawed system introduced by this Government with consequences so disastrous as to lead the chairman of the BMA, the national director of Modernising Medical Careers and the national clinical director of MMC all to resign, yet the Secretary of State sits there ignorant and oblivious to the consequences of what she has done.

Andrew Lansley: From my recollection—I am sure I will be corrected if I am wrong—it was 1999. That was the last time that there was a substantial bout of flu. We have been lucky— [Interruption.] Given that the Government failed to deliver flu vaccine at the right time, if we had had a substantial outbreak of seasonal flu at any point in the late autumn in either of the last two years, it would have had serious consequences.

Evan Harris: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the problems of training posts for junior doctors extend beyond the software of MTAS? There is a fundamental mismatch between the number of junior doctors looking for training posts and the number of posts available because consultant expansion has failed and there are not enough training programmes coming through. Does he accept that it does not make sense to plan medical students, plan house officers, plan senior house officers and plan registrars without planning for the end-product, which is consultant posts?

Andrew Lansley: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I remember that Sir Thomas More was a Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, so, when it comes to it, perhaps decapitation is one approach to the problem.
	Senior civil servants in the Department of Health were surveyed, and 84 per cent. did not believe that the Department was well managed. Professor Crockard, who is retiring as national director of MMC, said of MTAS:
	"From my point of view, this project has lacked clear leadership from the top for a very long time".
	The Secretary of State has been jeered by nurses, and heckled by midwives only today. A unanimous vote among junior doctors at a BMA conference called on her to resign. James Johnson chose to resign as chairman of the BMA. All that he did, so far as I can see, was to stand between an angry medical profession and the Secretary of State. He said:
	"It is the worst I have known it for over 30 years".
	NHS staff are continuing to deliver for patients. They are professionals, but they are not being treated professionally by the Government. They are angry because of the way in which they have been treated. The Government tell them that money is flowing, but they do not see it, and they are not given the chance to shape the care that they give to patients. They are angry because the Government are constantly telling them how to do their job, even though the Government are incompetent at doing their own.
	The Secretary of State has been responsible for so-called NHS reform, but there is no coherent reform. Staff in the NHS do not know what is happening, why it is happening or where it is going. There is no inspirational leadership. There is not even competent management, but there are urgent tasks to be done. Even the Secretary of State's own colleagues in the Government do not believe that she is capable of achieving those things, or that she will be responsible for doing so. The next Prime Minister will not keep her. The present Prime Minister would not defend her today. But the NHS needs change now. We should take charge, but we cannot. If there will not be a new Government, there must at least be a new Secretary of State, and that should happen now. I commend the motion to the House.

Patricia Hewitt: I will take no lectures from a partythat starved the NHS of funds and left patients waiting 18 months or more for desperately needed operations.

Patricia Hewitt: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was shown around the brilliant accident and emergency department at St Helens and Knowsley Trust by Graeme Inkster, one of the emergency consultants, who explained to me exactly why we do not have winter bed crises now. He showed me what he called the corridor of shame, which10 years ago was full of patients lying on trolleys waiting for hours on end. He said that he used to come into work first thing on a Monday morning and find patients queuing in the corridor; they had been left over from the weekend because there had not been anybody to treat them. Some of them had been there for six, 12 or 18 hours. The hospitals did not have the money or the staff, and they had not reorganised the care around the patients. The investment we put in and the reforms we made—and the four-hour accident and emergency target, which the Opposition opposed—drove the changes that led to us ensuring that we do not have winter beds crises.

Patricia Hewitt: My hon. Friend makes his point very graphically. That is another real tribute not only to NHS staff and the new cancer networks, but to the target—the promise that we made—that patients diagnosed with cancer would wait a maximum of62 days between an urgent GP referral and the start of cancer treatment. Just two years ago, fewer than two thirds of patients were getting from diagnosis to treatment so quickly; now more than 95 per cent. are. There have been real improvements in the past two years.
	Most important of all, the NHS is saving more people's lives. The lives of nearly 150,000 people with coronary heart disease have been saved. The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire had something to say on that subject. It is perfectly true that under the Conservative Government, death rates from coronary heart disease were falling, but they were falling a great deal more slowly than in most other parts of Europe, and have been falling faster since. I looked at the numbers. During the 1980s, those death rates fell by about 20 per cent.; during the 1990s, they fell by 26 per cent. During the years of this Labour Government, they fell by 36 per cent., and we will meet early our target for a 40 per cent. reduction in those death rates. Furthermore, 50,000 more lives have been saved as a result of our changes to cancer care, and suicide rates are at their lowest level ever because of our changes to mental health services.
	The hon. Gentleman mentioned the Mental Health Bill, which is going through Parliament. Since 1959, we have had a law under which a seriously suicidal mentally ill patient can, if the clinician judges it necessary to protect them from self-harm or suicide, be detained in hospital for treatment. We have discussed that recently. I find it extraordinary that the Conservative party should now want to end that provision and deny seriously suicidal patients the possibility of treatment from which they have benefited for decades.

Crispin Blunt: I think the Secretary of State betrayed herself earlier in her speech when she talked about a Labour chair of a PCT. I thought such people were meant to leave their politics behind when they discharged their duties to theNHS. However, our experience is reflected in a gerrymandered decision about the sites of hospitals in the south of my constituency, which drove the Surrey and Sussex Healthcare Trust into the largest deficit in the country under her predecessor. That was followed by her gerrymandered decision for a hospital at theSt. Helier site in the face of recommendations. Shewas driven off only because the decision was so unreasonable that it would not stand up to judicial review. It is because the Secretary of State has put the political interests of the Labour party first that she should resign.

Peter Lilley: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way. On the subject of weasel words, does she understand why Opposition Members sometimes find it difficult to put full credence in all the figures that she uses? That was illustrated yesterday, when she told my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Miss Kirkbride), who asked about the recruitment of nurses from Africa, that, because of the Government's uniquely ethical policy,
	"we do not take nurses from...Africa."—[ Official Report,22 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 1089.]
	When I pointed out that the Government have issued 50,000 work permits for nurses from Africa since 2000, her defence was that it did not really count because they came in via agencies rather than directly to the NHS and that that was difficult to stop. Can she tell us what is uniquely ethical about circumventing one's promises in that way and telling the House that we do not take nurses from Africa when we have given out 50,000 work permits? Why is that so difficult to stop when it is the Government who give out the work permits?

Patricia Hewitt: The right hon. Gentleman should talk to Health Ministers in the Governments in Africa, with whom we have reached agreements on this very point. Let me also remind him that only last year we took nursing jobs off the skills shortage list in order to ensure that the jobs went to nurses here.
	The point that I want to make about the clinical evidence for changes in services is that, as the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire knows full well, in the case of the most serious emergencies—for instance, strokes and heart attacks—it is much better to bypass the local hospital and be taken straight to a specialist centre, where the specialist staff and equipment are ready 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Close to home wherever safely possible and in a specialist centre where necessary—that is what clinicians are telling us. If the NHS can do that, each year we can save 500 more lives, prevent another 1,000 heart attacks and support more than 1,000 stroke victims to regain their independence, rather than being condemned to lasting disability. That is the clinical evidence. Rather than giving us weasel words, the Conservative party should be supporting clinicians in making the case for change.
	If we know that changing services will allow us to improve and save more lives, we would be betraying patients and the NHS if we refused to make those changes just because they were difficult. Leadership is about listening to clinicians, supporting them in making the case for change, involving local councillors and people in consultation, and then having the courage to back the NHS in making the right decision.

Norman Lamb: The Liberal Democrats will support the motion this evening because of the palpable loss of confidence in the Secretary of State, especially with regard to her handling of the junior doctors shambles—a subject to which I shall return. However, to some extent the right hon. Lady is a sacrificial lamb —[ Interruption. ] I thought the House would like that. She is a sacrificial lamb for the failings of the Government's stewardship of the national health service; others should take their share of the responsibility.
	The extent to which confidence in this Government's stewardship of the NHS has collapsed is remarkable. There has been record investment, which we supported, and some genuine progress has been made, yet both the public and health professionals have lost faith. Just this month, a "Newsnight" poll found that, in relation to the NHS, Labour was the least trusted party. The Liberal Democrats came top. [Hon. Members: "What a surprise."] Thank you—I acknowledge that straight away. It is remarkable that despite the Labour party's record of supporting the NHS over the years, it is now bottom in terms of public trust in handling the NHS. What has gone so badly wrong?
	Plenty of people other than the Secretary of State ought to appear on the charge sheet—for a start, the Tories. When they were in government, there were years of chronic under-investment in the NHS. In 1997, when the Conservative party left government, investment in the NHS was 6.8 per cent. of gross domestic product—33 per cent. less than the EU average. Given that we were spending a third less than the rest of Europe, it was no wonder that people had to wait interminably for operations. I remember people coming to see me who were waiting for hip and knee-joint operations, sometimes for three years from the first referral to the point at which they had their operation. That is not a world to which we want to return. It was no wonder that the infrastructure of the NHS—the buildings—was worn out and so much investment was needed. In addition, not enough doctors or nurses were being trained or employed in the NHS.
	The cumulative impact of that under-investment in the service that could be provided was massive. Let us compare our experience in the UK with that in the rest of Europe. In many countries elsewhere in Europe, waiting is simply not an issue. Never mind getting down to a maximum wait of 18 weeks next year; the fact is that people in many countries do not experience waits for operations. One has to take into account the massive head start that other countries have had because of their historically far higher funding for their health service than we have had in this country.
	In 2002, this Parliament came to the point at which we decided whether to vote for increased investment in our NHS. Even after being turned out of government, the Conservatives voted against that increased investment. Had they had their way, cumulatively over the ensuing period we would have had £35 billion less to invest in the NHS. Just imagine the closure of hospitals that we would be experiencing without that money! At the last election, their plan was to drain money out of the NHS to subsidise private health care—that was stated in a manifesto drafted by the Conservative leader before he changed his mind. We need to remember that record of what the Conservatives did, both when they were in government and when we reached the point of voting on increased investment in the NHS.

Norman Lamb: No, I will not give way on that point. I now turn my attention to the Labour party, and the question of whether everything is the Secretary of State's fault. She has been left to take the flak for a decade of missed opportunity, inconsistent policy and botched reform. The chickens have come home to roost, and it is on her watch that we are experiencing the effects of so much mismanagement over the past decade. Let us consider the record and the roles of previous Secretaries of State.
	In 1997, the Labour manifesto specifically said that the Government would scrap the internal market; that was the commitment made, but there is now an internal market. There is a purchaser-provider split, and hospitals compete for patients. That flip-flop in policy direction is the responsibility of the Labour Government as a whole, not just the current Secretary of State. As for the other institutional reforms that have taken place, there was the introduction of primary care groups, then the creation of primary care trusts, the scrapping of health authorities, the creation of strategic health authorities, and the merger of primary care trusts. There has been endless organisational change, and it has not all been in a consistent direction; there has been a flip-flopping from one approach to another at great cost, and with an enormous impact on the morale of the people working in the health service, including the doctors and nurses.

Norman Lamb: I am very much aware of that, and every time there is a change of organisation, another group of people get early retirement packages and redundancy packages. The impact on morale is intense. Changes have just taken place in Norfolk, and I know lots of people who are still in temporary posts and are waiting to have new posts allocated to them. Change always affects morale, and because the changes have been so frequent, the impact on the morale of patients, doctors, nurses and many other health professionals has been dramatic.
	Botched reform has also hit the voice of the patient and the public in the NHS. The right hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn) was responsible for abolishing community health councils when he was Secretary of State. I have since heard it said that he had a particularly bad relationship with his local community health council. CHCs were abolished in 2002, and patient and public involvement forums were established after that, in 2003. Three years later, they were abolished, and the local involvement in health networks were created. That was another mess, and a botched reform that left all those involved with a sense of total frustration, including people who, as volunteers, were trying to make a contribution to improving our health service.
	That same Secretary of State left another legacy: the current state of NHS IT. The hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller) got very hot under the collar on that point, but it is as though he is living in a parallel universe, and is not aware of what doctors in the NHS are saying about "connecting for health". Their view is very different from the rosy picture that he described. When a political commitment was made to "connecting for health", no proper analysis was undertaken of the need for the system, or of whether financial benefits would outweigh the costs. That is the view of the Public Accounts Committee, and the majority of its members are from the Labour party. It took the view that there was no proper analysis.
	The original budget was £2.3 billion, which will be exceeded. The PAC reckons that the costs range anywhere between £6.2 billion and £20 billion, compared with the original estimate of £2.3 billion. The project is therefore massively over-budget and it is behind schedule, too. The PAC says that the highly controversial patient clinical records scheme is running two years behind schedule, with no indication of when that part of the project will be complete. If one talks to any group of doctors, whether they are GPs or hospital doctors, one is met by a chorus of groans—they are completely frustrated by "connecting for health" and the way in which it has been imposed from the centre. Again, that has impacted on morale.

Andrew Miller: Yes, that is what it says in my notes. The article reports progress so far on the national programme, and it includes interviews with 25 senior managers and clinicians in four hospitals. May I point out to the hon. Gentleman that, contrary to what the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) said, there are 4,594 live sites providing the electronic prescription service, which is a huge improvement? I accept that it is a complex programme and that there are frustrations, but it is an immensely successfully development. There is now 100 per cent. coverageby PACS—picture archiving and communications systems—in London.

John Bercow: The hon. Gentleman has just highlighted an unwelcome imposition from the centre, and it would be fair to say that he—and there are such people in all parties in the House—subscribes to the doctrine of localism. May I, however, in all honesty, put it to him and to the Secretary of State that when we talk about services that will be provided to, and are needed by, only a small minority of people with very severe and sometimes complex needs, there is frequently a compelling case for a central pot of money, and even some central direction; otherwise the vulnerable people to whom I referred earlier may simply fall through the net? That has happened under successive Governments, so does the hon. Gentleman agree that the review of specialised commissioning, although welcome, could perhaps have gone further and that the Secretary of State might usefully be persuaded to take another look at it?

Norman Lamb: That is a very opportune intervention, and I entirely accept the point made by the hon. Gentleman. In any system that tries to decentralise control and accountability there should be a role for the centre, too. It is a national health service, after all, and those specialist areas are particularly important to ensure that there is coverage across the country. I therefore accept his point entirely.

Andrew Miller: May I follow up that point? The hon. Gentleman, who lives in Norfolk, will accept that if he were run over by the proverbial 73 bus tonight, in an ideal system, the first responder would have access to his medical records, thus enabling instant blood matching. There are good clinical reasons for centralism. Of course, there is a dichotomy, but he will accept that in a well developed system that is the kind of progress that we would like to see.

Norman Lamb: I will not give way again on that point.
	Spending on PFI schemes is projected to be £17.8 billion by 2014-2015. It has not been costed, yet it is imposing an enormous burden on local health economies.

Kevan Jones: As someone whose constituency is served by two brand new PFI hospitals, let me emphasise that they not only provide good quality health care but that they were built on time and on budget. How would the hon. Gentleman fund the hospital-building programme that the Government have achieved?

Norman Lamb: It is remarkable that Labour contributors appear to have swallowed the idea that the only way in which one can invest in capital projects is through PFI. Bonds are a perfectly good way of raising funds for capital investment. It does not have to be done through PFI.
	We are in an extraordinary position whereby we have record investment in the NHS, yet there is also record deficit. How did we get there? Too much investment has been wasted. The Health Committee drew attention to poor financial management, loss of financial control and the PFI obsession.
	The failings are the fault not only of the Secretary of State but of successive Ministers. Indeed, the pain of forcing trusts to address their deficits was delayed until after the last general election.
	Let us consider the legacy of another Secretary of State—the current Home Secretary. His legacy includes: the GP contract, which ran massively over budget and continues to have an impact on local health economies; the handover of responsibility for out-of-hours care from doctors to PCTs, which the Public Accounts Committee described as "shambolic", and the consultants' contract, which also ran massively over budget and, according to the National Audit Office, fails to deliver the intended improvements in patient care. There is also his target for cutting MRSA infections, which will be missed by next year, as C. difficile cases continue to increase. All those failures continue to afflict the NHS and the Government's reputation.
	Let us consider the current Secretary of State. She made a political commitment to sort out NHS finances, and the Government will undoubtedly hail the achievement of a small overall surplus as a victory at the end of the financial year, but at what price? Again, the Health Committee highlighted the impact on soft targets. Funding for voluntary organisations has been cut.

Norman Lamb: There is the threat to so many community hospitals around the country, including in my county of Norfolk. I fully accept that some reconfiguration of acute services is necessary, but in some cases, it is driven by financial crisis—again, a point that the Health Committee made.
	The dentists' contract is also a shambles, with people finding it literally impossible in some parts of the country to find an NHS dentist. Primary care trusts throughout the country face deficits in their dental budgets because of the Government's miscalculation of patient fee income.
	We then come to junior doctors and the disgraceful shambles of the medical training application service—MTAS. The judicial review has failed, and the Secretary of State has applied for costs in the case this afternoon against the junior doctors. I understand that the judge awarded costs but asked the Secretary of State to reflect on that. He made the point that she had acknowledged that mistakes had been made, and that she will have to work with junior doctors. Would not it be outrageous if she chose to pursue her recovery of costs against the junior doctors who have been the victims of the Government's mismanagement of the system? I urge her—she is trying not to listen—to announce in her statement tomorrow that she will not pursue the recovery of costs against junior doctors. She could clear up the matter this afternoon, if she chose to do so.
	Despite all the warnings that the system had severe problems, the Government ploughed on regardless, displaying a mixture of arrogance and complacency. Clearly, MTAS was not adequately piloted or tested. The statement of Nicholas Greenfield from the Department of Health to the High Court last week revealed that it became clear in April that the software was not working. A paper on 25 April noted that the
	"allocation algorithm was giving a different allocation from what was expected".
	Another paper to the project board on 26 April highlighted difficulties with the allocation principles. I quote:
	"It stated that until the issues were resolved, and the principles agreed, it would not be possible to confirm the feasibility of the allocation rules, to design and develop the allocation software, or to confirm the timetable for making offers to applicants."
	By 28 April, the situation was even worse. A report by Beverley Bryant, in the aftermath of the security breaches, concluded that further changes to system functionality were necessary. It stated, however, that making further changes
	"could further compromise the quality and security of the system which...could be fatal to the programme".
	In other words, the Government had no option. They had to decide not to proceed with MTAS. Why were we not told that on 1 May or in last week's statement? It was never mentioned.
	The Secretary of State has still not confirmed the number of extra training posts that will be available this summer to avert significant numbers of junior doctors being unemployed.

Norman Lamb: My hon. Friend makes a good point. The impact has not just been on junior doctors, but on all those who have had to conduct 15,000 extra interviews. There has therefore been an impact on patients too. What a mess.
	A litany of misjudgments, costly mistakes, changes of direction and botched reform has been the responsibility not just of the Secretary of State but of the whole Government. That is an extraordinary record of failure from a Government who warned us back in 1997 that there were 24 hours to save the NHS. Everyone knows that the Secretary of State will go when the new Prime Minister takes over. Is it not ludicrous that the NHS must wait six weeks for that to happen? When so much needs to be done, we have a lame duck Secretary of State. She should go now.

Natascha Engel: I shall try and restrict myself to 10 minutes and take out all the digs at the Tory Front-Bench team, except to say that once again we are having a health debate on an Opposition day, which I greatly enjoy taking part in. I have taken part in almost all of them, and I have yet to hear a Tory policy. Perhaps we will hear one later.
	The Department of Health is massive and wide ranging. I shall focus on cancer treatment and survival rates. Cancer affects almost every family and every person directly or indirectly. It is terrifying. Most doctors speak of the C-word rather than refer to cancer itself, because it used to be a death sentence. That is no longer necessarily the case. Although cancer is wide ranging and survival rates differ greatly, depending on the type of cancer, people are still twice as likelyto survive if they are diagnosed today than they were 10 years ago.
	The reason that we have been so successful in cancer treatment and have such high survival rates is because of early screening, early diagnosis and far better treatment. Almost everyone with suspected cancer who is seen by their GP will be sent to a cancer specialist within two weeks, and 99 per cent. of patients who have been diagnosed with cancer will have had treatment within one month of their diagnosis. These are fantastic statistics.
	Part of the reason for such success is that the NHS has introduced far greater flexibility in the system for cancer treatment and takes account of the needs of individual patients far more. Treatment is carried out in communities wherever possible. Simple chemotherapy treatments can now be given in district hospitals such as the Chesterfield and North Derbyshire Royal hospital, which has developed a chemotherapy suite so that patients do not have to travel all the way to Sheffield if they do not want to. The Chesterfield Royal has been so successful in its chemotherapy treatment that it is massively expanding its operation. It is a tiny district hospital, but the same is happening throughout the country so that patients diagnosed with cancer can receive treatment in a much calmer community-based environment, with their families close by. That is a huge achievement.
	Eighty per cent. of women diagnosed with breast cancer will survive for at least five years, compared to 50 per cent. only 30 years ago—again, a massive achievement. Two thirds of women who are newly diagnosed with breast cancer are likely to survive for another 20 years. These sound like random statistics, but about 1,400 people who are alive today would not have been alive 10 years ago.
	One of those people is my mother, which is the reason I wanted to take part in the debate. She is over 60, and three years ago had a routine mammogram at the Addenbrooke's hospital. She lives in the neighbouring constituency of Huntingdon. The nurses were not entirely happy with the results, sent off for a biopsy on that day, and she was given a positive diagnosis there and then. She was seen and treated within three weeks of that routine appointment, which is staggering. On the day that she had her mammogram, she was given the name and telephone number for a nurse whom she could call day or night if she was worried. That was spectacular. Her experience has been fantastic. There are many other women like her throughout the country. Those cancer rates are fantastic.
	Another example concerns a friend of mine who lives in my constituency and who has taken a terrifying but very brave decision. Her family has been blighted by breast cancer. She has lost grandmothers, cousins and aunts to breast cancer. When her mother was 38, she decided that she would have preventive breast surgery—a double mastectomy—to avoid having to go through with the cancer. She was the first woman in the country to have such a preventive double mastectomy.
	Becky, a presenter of a breakfast radio programme on Peak 107 FM, decided at the age of 24 to become the youngest woman in the country to have a double mastectomy—an incredibly brave decision for someone so young. She is beautiful and vivacious and has a very high profile in north-east Derbyshire. It is absolutely amazing. She had an 85 per cent. chance of developing breast cancer in her life. Taking the decision to have both breasts removed at such a young age was brave, but it was, for her, only a liberating experience. She has had breast surgery so she now has even better breasts than she had before! She is still enjoying life!
	The point is that modern technology and cosmetic surgery have meant that people like Becky can take blood tests and find out whether they are carrying a faulty gene, which was not possible before. A death sentence has been lifted from this girl and it is so easy to see it when we talk to her about her experiences.
	Those are two small examples—albeit very close-to-home examples—of where breast cancer treatment and survival rates have made a huge difference, not just to my life but to the lives of other people. I hope that we can continue to make a difference. The best chance of continuing to be able to help people with cancer, especially breast cancer, is to maintain a Labour Government, as recent history shows.

Grant Shapps: I shall try to adhere to your guidance, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
	If we are discussing the health service, it is important to acknowledge that extra money has been invested and some improvements made, particularly on waiting times. We then have to ask whether the money has been spent sensibly and whether we could get more from it by spending it more productively. One of the dangers of a debate like this is that we quickly descend into our own individual examples of exactly what is happening in our own local health economies and local hospitals. That sometimes misses the broader point, because it is always possible to find one example that proves or disproves a general rule, so I shall leave any comments about local matters until the end.
	What I want to say is that accountability within the health service is one of its great problems, despite the amount of money going into it. I suspect that we have all experienced the problem of taking an issue on behalf of a constituent to an acute health trust. It tells us that the matter is not its responsibility, but that of the commissioning agency, the primary care trust, which then says that it is a matter for the strategic health authority, now a regional body. The SHA proceeds to tell us that it is not a matter that it can deal with, because the Secretary of State needs to intervene. At that point, we contact the Secretary of State for Health, who tells us that it is a matter for the local health economy—[Hon. Members: "Absolutely"]—so we have gone round in a huge circle. It is extremely difficult, in a system that almost deliberately seems to go out of its way to cause such confusion, ever to pin down exactly who is responsible or accountable for what is happening locally.

Grant Shapps: I absolutely agree. We like the idea of foundation trusts and we want to go further and faster with them. We were going in that direction, until it was all reversed for the first half of the decade during which the Government were in power—before we realised the error of their ways.
	As I say, it is a problem of accountability. A great example is closing a chemotherapy unit on a temporary basis, when the entire community realises that it is actually being closed permanently. Chemotherapy is a treatment that people want to have close to home, if at all possible, for the simple reason that it is an uncomfortable experience. It is highly undesirable for people who are feeling sick to have to travel miles after their treatment.
	I have heard of cases of chemotherapy units being closed on a temporary basis in order to remove the need for the local NHS trust to consult the public on the closure. A temporary closure, unlike a permanent one, requires no consultation. Having temporarily closed the unit, the trust then consults on a permanent closure. The effect has been to close the chemotherapy unit permanently, while calling the closure temporary. The rules have been circumvented by pretending to have a consultation, even though the unit is already closed. This is just another example of the lack of accountability that has found its way, almost systematically, into the health service. The Secretary of State should address that issue.
	There are many other issues to address. Week in and week out in the House, we hear about a new top priority in the health service. Just the other week, I was highlighting the problems surrounding in vitro fertilisation in the NHS. In 2002, the then Secretary of State came to the House and said that everyone should be able to get at least one cycle of IVF on the national health service. I was very relieved to hear that. All three of my children were conceived through IVF, and the idea that others would be able to get the treatment through the NHS was to be welcomed.
	The trouble was that, after that had been happening for a while, it stopped. The reason for it stopping seemed to be that other priorities had come along and been piled on top of the original priorities set by the Secretary of State, resulting in the first priority being almost entirely lost. That applies to all manner of services. An investigation into audiology services revealed that, despite the 18-week target, the average wait is 42 weeks. In Liverpool, the wait for having a hearing aid refitted is five years—

Eric Martlew: I was first elected a member of a health authority in 1974. In 1977 I was appointed chair of Cumbria health authority by a Labour Secretary of State, and in 1979 I was not reappointed by a Conservative Secretary of State. There was something honest about that. There were people chairing health authorities who supported the Government's views. Now I am afraid we have given that away. Now, the Healthcare Commission appoints retired civil servants. In my area it has just appointed a new primary care trust, not one of whose non-executive directors lives in a city or a town. They all live in a rural area, and I suspect that they all come from the middle class.
	I do not think we have done very well in that regard, but I will say this. Since 1974, I have worked in one way or another—in the health authority or in Parliament—with every Secretary of State we have had, and I believe that the record of the Secretary of State we have today compares with that of the best of them.

Graham Stuart: You are joking!

Eric Martlew: Certainly her record compares very well with that of the right hon. Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell). I was a Member of Parliament during his time as Secretary of State.
	I think the Secretary of State would agree that she has been greatly assisted by dedicated staff, and also by record funding from a Labour Government. As we have heard today, the NHS has been transformed. We have heard about the experience of patients, as opposed to that of politicians or the general public: we have heard that 90 per cent. are pleased with the treatment that they have received, which is excellent.
	We have slashed waiting times. Members who have been here for a while will remember when their postbags were full of letters and their surgeries were full of walking sticks, because people were waiting for hip replacements or elective surgery. They were not waiting for 18 weeks or for 18 months; some were waiting for two or three years. As Members know, that does not happen any more. The hon. Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr. Goodwill) is waving a piece of paper. I would like to think it was his resignation, but I suspect that it is not.
	Deaths from cancer and coronary disease have declined, but it would be wrong of me to waste this short opportunity by saying that everything in the garden is rosy. Sorry, Rosie! I mean, I apologise to the Minister of State, Department of Health, my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster, Central (Ms Winterton).
	Mistakes have been made. I happen to believe that the reorganisation of Cumbria PCT was wrong. It needed to be reorganised because it was ridiculous to have three PCTs for 40,000 people, but the creation of a unitary PCT for the whole of Cumbria was entirely wrong, because it has made the PCT too remote. I only hope that we do not make the same mistake in the local government reorganisation and end up with a unitary Cumbria.
	At first there was great concern about clinics run by community action teams, but when we met the Minister of State he gave us assurances that the CATs would be tailor-made for rural areas like Cumbria, and would not take resources away. I hope that in the near future it will be announced not only that CATs will be complementary to services in Cumbria, but that one will be based at Cumberland Infirmary.
	The out-of-hours service in my constituency is not satisfactory. We have an out-of-hours organisation called CueDoc, with a surgery at the top of the highest hill in Carlisle. As there is no public transport, I cannot imagine how the elderly and the sick manage to get there, especially in the middle of the night, but that could be altered.
	However, let us compare that with how things used to be. My area had the first private finance initiative hospital in the country. I advise Members never to want to be the first at anything, because being at the cutting edge has its problems. My hospital had its problems, but they are being sorted out. However, the fact is that we had waited 40 years for that new hospital. The Conservatives cancelled it on four occasions. The previous hospital had been built a long time ago—during the time of Lloyd George—and the maternity service was dangerous because the district general hospital was three miles away from the maternity hospital and the consultants could not get to the maternity hospital and children were dying. That has now all been sorted out.
	Finally, I shall talk about the dentistry service in Cumbria. In 2005, because of how NHS dentists felt about contracts, the vast majority of those in Carlisle opted out of the service. There were long queues in the streets of Carlisle—which was embarrassing and made the national news—as one dentist said that if people did not sign up immediately they would not get a dentist at all. Last week, it was revealed in  The Cumberland News that we have provided 23,000 places for patients in Carlisle, and that there was no waiting list for dentistry there. When the Minister—my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster, Central—visited and we went to a surgery, we came across people who had not been to a dentist for 10 or 15 years. Under the current Secretary of State, we have cured the problems of dentistry in north Cumbria, and they can be cured throughout the country.
	That is not all that should be said on this matter. A headline in today's  News and Star reads, "Smile! New dentists will treat extra 7,000". That is not about my constituency; it is a story about the market town of Penrith, where there will also be no waiting list.
	It is wrong to say that the Secretary of State has failed. She has had a difficult task, but we are getting things right. One thing that we must do is ensure that the Conservatives never get another chance to decimate the NHS. They have never believed in it—they voted against it—and they still do not believe in it. Many of them do not even use it, so why should we trust them with it?

Stephen Dorrell: First, I shall respond to the closing comments of the hon. Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew) by referring to what the Secretary of State said in her speech. She began it by saying that being Secretary of State for Health is a great privilege—and she was generous enough to say that it was felt to be so not only by Labour Secretaries of State but by Conservative Secretaries of State as well. I did not agree with very much else of what she said, but I do agree that it is a great privilege to hold her office.
	However, when someone is granted a privilege it behoves them to ask what is expected of them in return. Given that this Secretary of State and her three Labour predecessors have been the beneficiariesof an unprecedented increase in national healthservice funding—increases that the Conservatives support—we can legitimately expect from her in return a commitment from the top of the national health service to deliver the best possible outcome for those increased resources. The charge that sticks against the Secretary of State is not that she is not committed to the national health service and its ideals—of course she is committed to them—but that she has not delivered the level of competence that the taxpayers and patients of this country are entitled to expect in return for the investment provided by her colleagues in the Treasury.
	The Secretary of State responds to that charge by setting out all the improvements that have been delivered in the NHS over the past 10 years, and I do not dispute that there have been big improvements in some aspects of the service it delivers. Conservative politicians who say that the NHS has got worse since 1997 are simply wrong. That defies the evidence and the experience of those who use the health service. As my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State made clear, the charge against the Secretary of State is not that things have not got better. They have got better under this Secretary of State as they have under all her predecessors going back to 1948. There are endless statistics that my predecessors and I could quote on the improvements that were delivered by the NHS. Such improvements have been delivered throughout its history and my hon. Friend was good enough to cite some of the statistics on cancer mortality this afternoon.
	The charge against the Secretary of State is that, in the old words of the school report, she has been too easily satisfied with her own work. We criticise her for losing the opportunity to deliver even bigger benefits for the resources that have been provided to the NHS.

Ian Austin: I am delighted to speak in this debate, which gives us the opportunity to set out some of the dividing lines between the parties on the health service, to examine some of the choices that the British people will face at the next election and to consider the Government's record on some of the issues.
	The hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) said that he did not want to talk about his constituency, but I want to talk a little about mine because some of the things that we have seen in Dudley demonstrate well some of the wider improvements of the health service across the country. It is fair to say at the outset that none of the improvements in Dudley would have been possible without the leadership of the Secretary of State and her colleagues. That is why I am speaking against the Opposition motion today.
	Dudley primary care trust has undertaken wide-ranging reforms to services in the community in the past few years. As a result, my constituents now receive in their own homes personalised, individual care that would previously have been found only in hospitals. New ways of working introduced by this Government mean that care is tailored more than ever to meet the specific needs of the individual patient.
	There are new rapid-care teams, care staff working in the community with mental health patients and new nurse consultants working with those most likely to return to hospital most frequently. We are intervening earlier and working on ways of providing preventive care closer to home. When the impact of the work of those staff on just the first few patients was analysed, it showed that the length of their stays in hospital away from their families had been reduced by an average of one week. The most recent figures show that the strategy has slashed the average length of stay in hospital by almost a quarter.
	There are new case managers, who ensure that patients who can be treated at home are not unnecessarily admitted to hospital and that those who are admitted return home more quickly. Such managers cut emergency admissions. Again, it is worth referring to the figures: the work of one manager alone meant that 88 people could be treated at home, away from hospital, in one eight-month period.
	We are linking up health and social services in ways that could never have been dreamt of before. We are cutting out inefficiencies, speeding up treatment and reducing waiting times. Under the superb leadership of Rachel Harris at Dudley primary care trust, we have pioneered a new community heart failure team, which provides new services in health centres and clinics. As a result, emergency admissions caused by heart failure were reduced by 16 per cent. in the first year; a nearby PCT that did not then have a similar service saw its heart failure admissions increase by 10 per cent.
	As I said earlier, services at our district general hospital, Russells Hall, have also been transformed. We have a brand-new £200 million hospital, developed under the private finance initiative, with more doctors and nurses treating more patients more quickly than at any time in history.
	That is not to say that things are perfect—they never can be. We have problems with car parking, and infection rates always cause concern. Other issues of chiropody and audiology have been raised by constituents.
	The truth is that none of the improvements I spoke about earlier would have been possible without the extra investment that the Government have put into the NHS, which the Opposition voted against, despite what the right hon. Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell) said earlier. Whatever they say about their new-found commitment to the NHS we must not let anyone forget that they constantly opposed that extra investment and would cut spending on the health service if they had the chance to do so.
	Under the Labour Government, investment in the NHS has doubled and it will have trebled by 2008 to more than £90 billion. The NHS is receiving an extra £8 billion this year—the biggest cash increase ever. All that investment means that there are about 280,000 more staff, as we heard earlier. There are more staff than at any period, with 35,000 more doctors, 80,000 more nurses—

Tim Loughton: That's not true.

Ian Austin: The hon. Gentleman may say it is not true, but his leader and the shadow Chancellor have promised to cut taxes every year under a Conservative Government through a so-called proceeds of growth rule. Their new third fiscal rule applied over the economic cycle would require spending cuts—if enforced this year—of £21 billion.  [ Interruption. ] Opposition Members are chuntering away, saying that they disagree, but they do not need to take my word for it; the Leader of the Opposition admitted that implementing the rule would lead to dramatic cuts in public investment compared to Labour's plans. These are the right hon. Gentleman's words—not mine: he said that
	"as that money comes in, let's share that between additional public spending and reductions in taxes. That is a dramatic difference. It would be dramatically different after five years of a Conservative Government".
	In the Budget, the Chancellor announced that spending on public services will be £61 billion higher by 2007-08 compared to 2004-05 and that total additional expenditure on the NHS in the coming year will be£10 billion higher than this year—a 10 per cent. increase. The Opposition refuse to match our spending plans.

Andrew Lansley: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. The Labour Government's spending plans run only to the end of this financial year—that is, March 2008. We are indeed committed to matching those spending plans. If the hon. Gentleman has privy knowledge of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's plans beyond April 2009, we shall be happy to consider it.

Ian Austin: What I have knowledge of is the proceeds of growth rule, which commits the hon. Gentleman's party to spending less on public services than we would. He has not denied that the proceeds of growth rule would result in a Conservative Government spending less on public services than a Labour Government. As I said earlier, if that rule was introduced this year, it would mean spending would be £21 billion lower than under the Government's plans. It would be lower still in every year after that. Let me put it another way: spending on the NHS accounts for almost a fifth of the Government's total managed expenditure, so cutting £21 billion from public spending would mean slashing £3.6 billion from the NHS. To achieve that, one would have to sack 100,000 nurses, 35,000 doctors and cut by a fifth the number of new hospitals, clinics and health centres.
	All the talk about a new compassionate Conservative party that is committed to the NHS is exposed as the old empty rhetoric masking the same old Tory party. The Conservatives might not give us the details about where the cuts would fall, but every speech makes it absolutely clear. What do they mean when they talk about cutting back the big state or cutting the fat from public expenditure? They might not give us the details about which services they would slash to pay for the tax cuts or which bits of the big state they want to trim back, but the fancy photo calls, the so-called rebranding, the hospital visits, the fact that the Leader of the Opposition spent time in a school in Hull, and lived with what the Opposition patronisingly referred to as an ordinary family in Birmingham for a week, cannot mask the truth that this is the same old Tory party, running down the NHS because it is committed to the same old spending cuts.
	The British people face a choice at the next election: record investment and reformed ways of working, transformed treatment, improved care and the aim of keeping patients at home and alive for longer under this party, or the same old Tory party with the same old package of cuts, charges, and privatisation.

Tim Loughton: I will not.
	The independent advisory group on sexual health and HIV found that substantial parts of the£300 million that had been set aside to improve sexual health had been raided by PCTs to cover deficits and that the money reached the front line in only 30 out of 191 PCTs. The ticking time bombs that are being built up under this Secretary of State could create catastrophic conditions in the future. Most recently, we have seen figures showing that a fifth of hospitals have failed to eliminate mixed-sex wards. Disgracefully,in the mental health service, 55 per cent. of acute hospitals now have mixed-sex wards. We do not need to repeat the debacle over the medical training application service. We should not be surprised about all that because the Secretary of State has form—she showed it when she was Secretary of State for Trade and Industry.
	The Secretary of State has received a vote of no-confidence from her own staff. An external survey for Whitehall showed that fewer than two out of10 senior civil servants at the Department of Health believed that it was well managed, while only 4 per cent. thought that the Department was able to manage change well. If the right hon. Lady cannot successfully lead the 3,500 people in her Department, she cannot be trusted to lead the 1.4 million people working inthe NHS.
	A recent survey in  Hospital Doctor showed that under this Secretary of State, 69 per cent. of doctors would not recommend a career in medicine. Some56 per cent. of doctors believe that there have been no improvements in the NHS since 2002. According to an official survey by health service regulators, fewer than half of NHS staff would be happy to be a patient at their own hospital. What an indictment of the Secretary of State's policies over the past two years. A survey by  Health Service Journal found that among NHS chief executives, the right hon. Lady was the least popular Secretary of State for Health in the past decade—and she had some competition.
	The Secretary of State has no support in her Department, no support in the NHS and, apparently, no support from her Front-Bench colleagues. The chairman of the Labour party has protested against the closure of maternity services and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport has protested against the closure of 24-hour emergency clinics. The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), and the Chief Whip have protested against the closure of maternity services, as have the Minister for Local Government and the Health Secretary's departmental colleague, the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis). The Solicitor-General, Home Office and Work and Pensions Ministers, and Parliamentary Private Secretaries to Ministers at the Departments of Trade and Industry and of Health have all protested against the right hon. Lady's health policy, on her watch as Secretary of State for Health in this Government.
	The right hon. Lady has lost the confidence of her Department. She has lost the confidence of junior doctors and the next generation trying to train for a career in the NHS. She has lost the confidence of the RCN and nurses. She has lost the confidence of midwives. And she has lost the confidence of the patients she is here to serve.
	The right hon. Lady has taken the culture of "Not me, guv" to new heights. It is never her fault. In November 2006, she told the Health Committee that it was the fault of the NHS for employing too many staff. In March 2006, she blamed "clinical resistance" to change in the NHS for all the problems. Just last week, for MTAS she blamed the BMA, the royal colleges and the postgraduate deaneries—never herself—and today we have seen her blame African Governments for her Government issuing 50,000 work permits for African nurses working in the NHS. It is never the fault of the Secretary of State for Health, never the fault of her Ministers and apparently never the fault of her Department.
	There has been a catalogue of departures by people around the Secretary of State. In March 2006, Sir Nigel Crisp departed, as did a Health Minister in the Commons and another in the Lords. Since June 2006, no fewer than six of the 14 board members at her Department have departed. Most recently, James Johnson, chairman of the BMA, fell on his sword after MTAS. Why? It is never the Secretary of State who takes responsibility.
	The NHS budget is larger than the GDP of 155 member nations of the UN and it needs skill and expertise to run it, yet under the right hon. Lady's leadership the central management of the NHS has rapidly come to resemble one of the less distinguished banana republics. The Home Secretary has just announced a £3.5 million bonus scheme for his Department, which he described as "not fit for purpose"—a perverse system that rewards failure. The Secretary of State should take the leaf out of her own policy of seeking to implement payment by results and to link elements of GP pay to patients' satisfaction—but I fear that if she took that route, she would end up a net contributor to the Exchequer, rather than taking the modest £1,000 reduction that our motion proposes.
	This Secretary of State has taken complacency, incompetence, fantasy and the art of the patronising to new heights. She has exploited the good will and hard work of staff in the NHS, whose dedication has been in spite of her, not because of her. Their loyalty and patience have been and are being severely tested. Reducing her salary by £1,000 is poor compensation for two years of mismanagement. She is past her sell-by date. It is time that she gave the NHS a break. It is time for her to go.

Andy Burnham: The first responsibility of any Secretary of State for Health is to NHS patients. As much as we have obviously been hanging on every word uttered by Opposition Members this afternoon, I hope that they will not be too offended if I say that we set a little more store by the views of real patients treated in real NHS hospitals in the past 12 months. That is the ultimate verdict—the one that counts and the one on which every Health Secretary should be judged—so what is their verdict?
	Let us start with the Leader of the Opposition's constituents: 94 per cent. said that the care that they got from their local trust last year was good, verygood or excellent. The shadow Health Secretary's constituents were even more pleased: 95 per cent. of them said the same, with a full 43 per cent. saying that it was excellent. Just 1 per cent. said that the care they received was poor. The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) is developing such a talent for whinging about the NHS that it would not surprise me if that 1 per cent. was him. The Healthcare Commission's figures record an improvement in patient satisfaction on last year. Those are the facts. They tell me that under my right hon. Friend's leadership, patient care is getting better in the NHS.
	However, we are not so arrogant as to say that there are not real issues to be addressed in the health service. Many have been raised today. The hon. Member for North Norfolk and others talked about MTAS. We have acknowledged that there have been serious problems with the system and we have promised to learn the lessons from those problems. Interviews are taking place now, and I believe that today's ruling in the courts will allow us to map out a way forward. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will say more tomorrow, including on the issue of costs, which the hon. Member for North Norfolk mentioned. I hope that that will enable us to move the issue on.
	The hon. Gentleman made a big attack on private finance initiatives in his speech. He may correct me if I am wrong, but are not his constituents benefiting from a new PFI hospital, and is it not the case that PFI allows more areas to get their new hospital at once? Is it not a case of the hon. Gentleman saying, "We've got ours; we're all right, and we'll cancel those other hospitals" including the Leeds children's hospital, which he was asked about, although he could not answer the question?
	My hon. Friend the Member for North-East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) made a powerful speech about the spectacular improvements in cancer care since the Government came to power. She was right to say that cancer affects every family in the country, including mine, which was affected by it only this year. One of the earliest targets that the Government set was on access to cancer services for people who have a suspected cancer. That is precisely the kind of target that the Opposition have been deriding and would remove. My hon. Friend was absolutely right to point to improvements in that regard.
	We next heard from the Tories' self-appointed campaigner-in-chief, the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps). He began his speech by saying that money had been invested, improvements had been made and waiting times were down. I have only one thing to say to him: I thank him very much for his support this afternoon.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew) made important points about the NHS appointments process. He said that experience of politics and public life should not bar people from appointments, and I do not think that he will find any disagreement from Labour Members. He also said that services should be provided locally, and of course we agree with him on that, too. I can understand his frustration about the primary care trust changes, but they resulted in partnerships being more coterminous with local government, and that allows us to strengthen those partnerships across the country. On the issueof community action teams, he will know that a Cumbria-wide review is in preparation. The question of CAT services will be addressed as part of that review, which will be published in a few weeks' time.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley, North (Mr. Austin) tied the shadow Health Secretary up in knots on the issue of health funding. It was a pleasure to watch, and the shadow Health Secretary completely failed to address my hon. Friend's points. The shadow Health Secretary said that the Tories had committed to the spending plan and would have invested the same amount as the Government did, but he conveniently forgot about the patient passport idea proposed by the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron). Had he forgotten about that?

Andy Burnham: If the hon. Gentleman had been listening, he would know that she had said that it was for specialist care. I repeat that there is no official Department of Health guidance on the matter.
	How does the Labour Secretary of State's record compare with the record of Opposition Members? On my right hon. Friend's watch, waiting lists have fallen to their lowest ever level—not just a low level, but the lowest ever level. Just 352 people have been waiting for more than six months, and the figures are falling further still in every English constituency represented in the House. She has had the political courage to take hard decisions to put the NHS back in financial balance, and it is on that platform that she laid out plans to invest an extra £8 billion in the NHS this year. She is the first Secretary of State since the early 1990s to see MRSA rates fall after the inexorable rise that began under the previous Government, and that is something on which we want more progress. She has presided over continuing falls in death rates from cancer and coronary heart disease, thus saving lives up and down the country. Moreover, there has been no winter crisis on her watch.
	I must tell the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire that the House fell about when, in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris), who asked why there had not been a winter crisis since 1999, he said, "Luck". I thought for one horrible moment that he was going to say "global warming", but he did not. Let us look at my right hon. Friend's achievements. We have the lowest ever waiting lists. Is that luck? No, it is not. We have the best cancer care that the country has ever seen. Is that luck? I do not think so. We have the best health care system in the English-speaking world, as judged by the Commonwealth Fund in a report this week. Is that luck? I do not think so. It is a record of which she can be proud. Waiting lists, infection rates, death rates from cancer and coronary heart disease—those are things that matter to the people who put us into office. They are the things on which every Secretary of State should be judged. It is a record of which she can be proud, and it is a record of which the Labour Government are proud. I urge the whole House to send those cocky Tories packing tonight.
	 Question put, That the original words stand part of the Question:—
	 The House proceeded to a Division.